


When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?

by eternalribbit



Category: Homestuck, MS Paint Adventures
Genre: Abuse, Alcohol, Childhood Trauma, Dreams and Nightmares, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, F/M, Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Memory Loss, Multi, Past Abuse, Simulation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-23
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:15:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 45,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25456045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eternalribbit/pseuds/eternalribbit
Summary: Ever since he was a kid, Dave has had some weird dreams. They always felt so vivid, so real, and they only get stronger with age. As he and his friends try to piece together the truth behind a shared dreamscape and a mysterious traumatic event from their childhoods, he can't help but wonder: why does that other world seem so much like home, and why does he feel such a longing for someone whose name he can't even recall?
Relationships: Dad/Mom, Dave Strider/Karkat Vantas, John Egbert/Dave Strider, John Egbert/Dave Strider/Karkat Vantas
Comments: 10
Kudos: 52





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hey there,
> 
> First off, is this fandom even relevant anymore?? I truly don't know. It's 2020, and I have chosen to cope with Covid stress by writing about Dave Strider being as much of an emotional wreck as I am. Am I projecting? Absolutely. Is this a bit out of character? Definitely. But I am lonely and gay and have a lot of feelings. Lets all work them out together.
> 
> If you read this and enjoy it, please leave kudos. I'll keep posting even if yall hate it, but I need the validation.
> 
> Also yes, I got the title of the fic from a billie eilish song. no, i will not be using her lyrics or anything, i just liked the name! shouts out to billie, im not a superfan but the songs i do know are great so. thanks girl.

When it all ends, it’s with a strange stillness. 

One minute, Dave was running. Running for his life, being chased by a horde of Dersite soldiers, sweating buckets into the already soggy fabric of his godtier pajamas. The red of his own blood soaked into his clothing, darkening the shade of his shirt and the legs of his pants. An insistent flame of exhaustion burnt in nearly every nerve ending of his body, and oh god did it hurt, but he couldn’t stop running, couldn’t let them get him.

“Dave!” 

He heard it somewhere above him, a desperate cry cutting through the chaos and cacophony all around, and he knew that voice, he knew it so well. Before he could even look up there was a hand grabbing him by the scruff of his cape, dragging him into the air. 

“I’ve got you!” John proclaimed as he adjusted his grip around Dave, trying not to drop him as he launched into the sky again, both boys panting and wheezing pitifully. Any other time, this would probably be a hoot and a holler for them both. Instead, John was all seriousness, blue eyes hard as sapphires and eyebrows drawn together in concentration as he put all his energy into getting away from the battlefield. Dave was starting to catch his breath, and remembered his own ability to fly. Each of them regained balance midair, gliding on little eddies of wind, and took in the scene below. It seemed that everything was rapidly catching fire. Dave scanned the landscape, then gave John a tense nod, and the Heir of Breath swooped down for a sloppy landing, the two boys skidding and stumbling as their feet reconnected with the ground. They shared a glance, worried and wide-eyed, but before Dave could open his mouth to speak, John took him by the hand again and took off again. They soared over patches of black and white checked grass, heading for…well, Dave wasn’t really sure what they were heading for. 

Ahead of them, Dave could see a shape rising up out of the field: a tall rectangular shape, red in the center, with a white border. As they approached, he knew what it was: a door. The door to their final hope, to their new world. The door to the end of this nightmare.

“Look!” John shouted, pointing ahead. “There they are!” 

Dave could see them too, now; Rose, Jade, and Dirk stood by the door, weapons drawn. A small swarm of imps were crowding around them; Dirk and Rose were brandishing weapons, fighting them back.  
Jade had seen them too, and was waving her arm. “Come on!” She shouted. “It’s time!” 

They quickly closed the gap, Dave drawing his sword at the last minute to slash the head off an imp as he descended for a landing. Black blood spewed from its neck before it exploded in a POOF of smoke. The rest scattered, screeching feebly in defeat. An explosion roared over the horizon. A look was exchanged between all of them, a silent confirmation of their well-being. 

“Well come on then,” Rose said, her voice like a cool, mirror-surfaced pond. “Let us see what is waiting for us out there.”

John nodded, and Jade turned the knob. 

They stepped into a new space, about as nonsensical as any they had found themselves in over the last few years. Their steps echoed out into the darkness, despite all around them being what appeared to be the vacuum of space. Dave held his breath, looking around at the stars. Even after all this time, he never got over how close they looked. 

“What took you so long, asshole?”

Dave’s stomach somersaulted, and he pushed past his friends to the front of the pack. There was Karkat, looking flustered. He had been waiting so long. The two of them made eye contact, and each softened. Dave, unable to contain himself, flash stepped for the first time in ages, and collided clumsily with the young troll, clobbering him in a tight hug before he could protest. And protest he did, though feebly, before gripping Dave back in a tight hug. He was feverishly hot, like most lowbloods were, and Dave had missed the warmth. Karkat’s sharp claws dug into Dave’s shoulderblades, but neither noticed. They swayed for a second, unwilling to let go, and even though they knew the game was not quite finished, it felt like a victory.

“Hey, lovebirds, knock it off. We have business to attend to, yeah?” Dirk sounded amused as he said it. They could all feel it in the air; this was it, the big finale. After this, they would finally have peace. 

Dave pulled away, but kept hold of Karkat’s wrist. He could feel the troll’s heart thumping its too-fast rhythm, extra agitated by the excitement. They turned toward the rest of the group; Rose and Kanaya shared a tight embrace. Roxy and the other Alphas had come to stand by Dirk’s side, Roxy holding his hand and glowing with excitement as she gushed about what he had missed. Dave felt his stomach sour, suddenly, with anxiety. He looked around at all his friends, standing on the platform. A large, red house, the Sburb Alpha logo, stood at the edge of the circular platform. The door they had come through had already dissolved into the ether behind them, and the new house had formed a door of its own. The whole structure vibrated and hummed with energy; Dave could feel it in his gut, in his chest cavity. It filled him from toe to crown. He clutched at Karkat’s hand, and the troll gripped back.

“So. We’re good to go, yeah?” John asked Karkat, and the two of them shared a look. Dave couldn’t quite tell what it was. It felt like an ending, a farewell. But wasn’t this supposed to be a beginning? 

“Yeah,” Karkat replied gruffly. “Yeah, it’s time to go. Care to do the honors?”

John seemed unsure, but then gave a bright grin. He was excited to go home, whatever that meant now. He looked around at the group in silence for a moment. Jade held in her hand a whirling mass that was trying to shape itself into a baby planet. It was almost finished, now; the size of a basketball, rivers and lakes and clouds crisscrossing its surface. She nodded in agreeance. 

“Well. Here we go. It’s been an honor, uh…playing with you guys,” John chuckled, and his hand came to rest on the door knob. It glowed brighter. He turned it, and the light grew so bright, even Dave’s sunglasses weren’t dark enough to block it out. He felt like he was floating, dissolving even. One by one, they filed through, until Dave and Karkat were next. Karkat let go of his hand. They shared a smile.  
Then Karkat was gone into the light, and Dave was next.

Dave took a deep breath, and stepped through the door.

What he found on the other side was unlike anything he would have imagined.

He had expected to step out into some kind of glorious new universe, or maybe even the old one. Hell, even that old dump would be glorious, Dave thought. By then, he just wanted to rest, to lay his head down on a pillow, his aching body on an actual bed. He just wanted to fucking sleep.

Instead of finding rest, peace, reprieve, he was greeted with blank whiteness. Smooth white walls, floor, ceiling. Nothing broke the blinding monotony of it at first. Even Karkat was gone, which made his stomach sink. Then, all of a sudden, a glowing phrase in all caps materialized on the wall opposite him.

_**LOADING, PLEASE WAIT.** _

“What?” he groaned, hands balling into fists. Dave suddenly felt ancient, like he had lived a thousand lifetimes (which, he guessed, in some ways, he had) and at the same time, he felt like a child. Impatience and anxiety made his skin itch and crawl. There was an uncomfortable silence and stillness. Then, as if carried in by the wind, something started taking shape before his eyes, like an infinite number of dust motes whirling and compacting together to form…what? He couldn’t seem to make it out, though he knew he should know. Exhaustion was making it hard to focus, though with some effort, slowly it started making sense. A blob of the stuff that had collected on the floor split in two and rapidly started expanding upward, only to connect again. It bubbled and roiled and looked like little more than a lump of clay, though the longer he watched, mesmerized, the more it bore a very, very rough resemblance to…a person? It grew arms from its torso, a head, and then details began to form.

“Hello?”

The lights cut out suddenly, and it was too dark to see, even with his sunglasses off and clenched in the palm of a trembling hand. The figure was gone, as quickly as it had come. Dave’s heart hammered in his ribcage, his eyes stared wide and blind out into empty blackness. What If it went wrong? What if you didn’t actually win?

_It’s too quiet._

His breaths were the only sound audible in the pressing nothingness.

“Rose?” his voice pitched up on his sister’s name. “Jade? Dirk? Hey!” 

No one replied. He felt, very suddenly, as though he was going to die wherever he was, or may already be dead. At the end of the road, after all that they had fought for, Dave and his friends couldn’t win. On some level, they had known that for a long time, hadn’t they? It would make sense if everyone died when John opened that door, even Dave, even though he could still think and feel and breathe. Stranger things had happened to him lately, after all; being trapped in purgatory would just be the icing on the cake. Horrified, he curled his arms around his trembling body, clenching fingers into pajama fabric, chest heaving. Was this really death? Just this for the rest of time? Time was his aspect, and Dave knew it intimately; he couldn’t imagine hanging there in the void, helpless, waiting out a timer that would never ever tick down. He imagined an hourglass, full of sand red as the gear he wore emblazoned across his narrow chest. The ends of the glass were open, sand constantly pouring in and through into the emptiness. Never ending, never slowing, the sand flowed.

_You’re all alone. You’ll die here in the dark. Everyone left you._

“Hey, asshole.”

The gritty, familiar voice reached Dave as the first pinprick of light peeked through the dark, like a flashlight shined out from behind blackout curtains. A strange, fatigued delay still clung to his limbs, like he was moving through deep water. He wanted to call out, but he was still too panicked to speak. Dave reached out a hand, fumbling in the dark, searching for the source of the voice. His callused fingers bumped against inhumanly warm flesh, and Dave grabbed desperately at the proffered hand. The other boy’s fingers laced with Dave’s, and the Knight squeezed so hard he was half surprised when their phalanges didn’t snap like brittle twigs. 

“Careful, fuckface, ow. I’m right here. It’s cool, Don’t have a fucking barnbeast,” Karkat’s voice was trembling, but not fearfully; rather, he sounded almost giddy as he pulled on Dave’s arm, tugging him into the steadily growing beam of light. Dave had to blink and squint, raising the hand with his sunglasses in it to block out some of the warm glow. Clumsily, he shoved the glasses back onto his face with one hand and tried to focus on Karkat. The first thing he was able to make out was a hand and forearm, grey with sharp, pointed claws for fingernails. Dave’s eyes flicked up to the troll's face, but he was still lit harshly from behind, and it was hard to see details. His eyes, though, were glowing reddish-orangey-gold, lit up in a gentle bio-luminescent sort of way. Dave’s heart continued beating heavily against his ribs with near painful intensity, but now for different reasons. _‘God,’_ he thought, _‘I’m so fucking gay.’_

“Come on!” the young troll shouted, tugging on Dave’s arm again. It was a motion reminiscent of a little kid trying to drag his mom to the toy aisle in the store, his excitement was so apparent. Dave noticed he could see the gleam of his sharklike fangs in the light when Karkat turned away a little. “Lets go, everyone’s waiting.” 

Dave felt assured that he had been wrong, that everything was okay. _‘My friends will be there, waiting for me, when I step into the light. Everything worked out,’_ he thought, near disbelief. The odds had been so thoroughly stacked against them all. And yet… 

Finally beginning to relax, Dave took a step, and opened his mouth to say his name. “Kark-“

Suddenly, with an audible _Whoom_ sound, like an entire factory's worth of machinery shutting down at once, everything blurred again, and took on a strange, feverish haze.

"No," Dave tried to cry out, but his voice was hard to find once again. _‘Oh no no oh no no no no NO--'_

_“Dave?”_

Karkat's mouth moved, but the wrong voice came out. Karkat’s eyes were wide and filled with fear. His grey hand was still outstretched, reaching for Dave to grab it. Dave’s heart swelled in his throat. His breath was gone. It was like drowning in lava, burning away flesh and blood as he tried to heave himself out of it. He couldn't move, or speak. He could only dissolve, as Karkat screamed soundlessly.

Dave woke to the boom of thunder, and just like every other time, he couldn’t remember the name of the boy in his dream.

“Dave, dude, wake up!”

When he opened his eyes, Dave realized that he had not only been thrashing around in his sleep, but that he had been crying out too. He sat upright in bed, heaving breath, his hair dripping sweat down his wan face. It was such an odd dream, already fading again. He had had it a million times now, and it never stopped feeling real. 

He reached for his bedside table and fumbled for his glasses. Unfortunately, probably due in at least some small part to years of wearing sunglasses inside, he needed a prescription now. John teased him constantly about how Dave’s lenses were even thicker than his own now. As he put the black plastic frames on his face, he felt a bit more clarity return. He turned the lamp on and looked blearily at the figure in his doorway.

John, as always, looked concerned and disoriented. Without looking at the clock, Dave knew it was around four fifteen in the morning. To his credit, John never seemed to mind being woken up this early. He knew well enough by now that if Dave was visibly upset, it was probably best to put his snarky asshole side to bed and be compassionate for a while. For a few seconds, the two just stared at each other, Dave slouched with his hands in his lap, still trembling, John with one hand gripping the doorframe like he was holding himself back. His black hair was wild and curly above his thick eyebrows. He must have come quick, Dave noticed, because he didn’t have his glasses on either; dark bags were visible under John’s sleepy blue eyes. Outside his window, he could hear the wind whooshing and rain sluicing against the bricks and windowpanes. 

“Was it the same this time?” John asked, still hesitating at the threshold. 

“…Come sit down,” Dave sighed, scooting over. John obliged, crossing the floor to sit cross-legged on the bed next to his roommate. This was a ritual by now; in the two years the two of them had lived together, the dream had woken Dave screaming at least once a month, sometimes more. John never seemed to mind, and he even claimed to nightmares of his own. He handled things differently, he reckoned, or maybe he had repressed it enough by now that whatever trauma caused him to dream of his father’s mutilated corpse pouring blood on a black and white checked tile floor simply didn’t hit as hard as it used to. Fear had brought them closer than ever before; it was hard to deny someone the comfort of an embrace when they are so level and cool normally, but were reduced to tears by a simple nightmare. Dave had begun to soften up with time, and had given into John’s prying and touchy-feely methods of comfort. He still was not sure how to handle the latter sometimes; it was a hard adjustment, having come from such an affectionless home. 

“Do you want to talk about it?” John asked quietly. He started to reach a hand out for Dave’s arm, and recoiled. Dave didn’t like to be touched, and John knew that as well of course; he had found out the hard way when they met in person for the first time at sixteen. It felt like coming home to an old friend. John had hugged his best friend tight when picking him up from the airport, and it was instantly apparent that the other boy was not used to physical contact. Later, it would come out how Dave’s brother had neglected and abused him, and that behavior had shaped the younger Strider’s mannerisms in a major way. Dave was always in survival mode. John tried to be respectful, but in his house, Dad had always been so affectionate, and they were open with feelings, emotions, and hugs. Dave was like a very stubborn clam, hiding inside a clutch of pearls that had been irritating his guts his whole life. Seeing a person that raw, especially someone so close to him, broke John’s heart. He often found it painful to resist just gathering his best friend into a bear hug and wringing the pain out of him like an old sponge. 

Dave sat quietly for a while before looking back up at John. “Can…..can I hold your hand?” he felt his freckled face begin to flush scarlet from chin to ear-tips. It was incredibly hard to ask, but this time he needed it. The thunder made things worse, and when it clapped again he found himself cringing at the sound. He had always been terrified of storms, after Bro had left him alone through so many Texas twisters, floods, even hurricanes. Once, a window of their high-rise had shattered when Dave was home alone, and the storm whipped sheets of rain through it for an hour or more before Bro had come home. He had found Dave hyperventilating in the bathtub, convinced that he was going to die as the floodwater rose in the street below, and had berated him for being such a pussy. It was a memory Dave found hard to shake. 

John was surprised, but didn’t comment. He offered his hand, callused from years of playing instruments and working in the garden the two of them had started in the back yard. He felt a wave of peace wash over him as Dave not only took his hand, but laced their fingers together. Peace, and…maybe something else. John swallowed the lump rising in his throat. Their fingers were a nice contrast together; his were on the thicker side, with rich brown skin and a sprinkle of black hair, while Dave’s were pale, long, and bony, just like the rest of him. The backs of his hands and arms were smattered with freckles, just like the ones that dusted his forehead and cheeks. Working outside in the summer sun had made them darken up lately. 

“What are your dreams like?” Dave asked. 

John paused. They rarely discussed his side of things. Something about hearing Dave talk about his own dreams bothered John; every so often he would get an odd feeling of déjà vu, like some detail from Dave’s had spilled into his own subconscious. It was logical, he figured, considering how close they were, that things would rub off. The pair had known each other over a decade, and had gone through a lot in all those years. When college came around and the two of them decided to move in together, it only made more sense. Their tiny house was close quarters, and John, being an empath, often felt what Dave felt. But the dreams…they made him uneasy. 

“It’s usually the same one,” John began, choosing his words carefully. “I’m in this….castle, and my dad is dead. Bleeding out everywhere. There is a fire somewhere; I can smell the smoke. Sometimes, Rose’s mom is there, too. She’s also dead.” He paused, looking at their entwined fingers again. “Then there are some oddballs. Snippets of weird shit. My grandma’s ghost. These weird bug people with black and white shells for skin. Giant salamanders. Some are good dreams. Some, though…”

“What about...Uh. People with grey skin? And shark teeth?” 

The hair on John’s arms stood up. Involuntarily, he squeezed Dave’s hand harder. He had seen them before, too. In fact, Rose and Jade had spoken of similar… hallucinations? People with grey skin, fangs, and these horns…

“Haven’t we already established this was some weird shared delusion from watching too much TV?” John asked with an uneasy chuckle, though he already knew where this was going. That had been the explanation they came up with, but the four of them had never felt sure of it. Something had happened, and they all knew it. But what proof did they have? They had each done their own research, digging for some event that could have triggered it. Nothing ever turned up.

When John was thirteen years old, something strange happened. It was his birthday, and when his Dad came home from work, John was face-down in the driveway, unconscious. The story he had been told was that he had had a seizure and passed out on the way to get the mail. When he woke up, John was in a hospital bed, concussed and delirious. He saw his father’s face and immediately began wailing, sobbing, clinging to Dad like he would never see him again. When he eventually was strong enough to go home, he logged on to his computer and, to his utter shock, his friends shared similar stories. Rose woke up in her mother’s observatory, nose bloody, disoriented and babbling about a vampire girl with a chainsaw. Jade fell from the second floor balcony of her house, and was in the hospital for a month, asking the nurses if they had heard any news from the planet Alternia. Then there was Dave, found on the rooftop of his apartment building, bloodied, bruised, and desperately dehydrated and sunburned. No one knew how long he was out there or what happened, as his brother was not around. That was when the neglect case came about. Bro managed not to go to jail or lose custody somehow. Dave was never too thrilled about it, and refused to talk to anyone about what happened in that house, even after he turned eighteen and bailed to Washington to be with John. For a long time, they all chalked it up to a weird coincidence, but John could tell that there was something missing in the story. A huge chunk of his memory was gone, and despite being found in the driveway, he distinctly remembered being in his room when Dad came home from work, and trying to sneak by him to get to the mailbox for some reason he couldn’t quite recall.

For John’s sixteenth birthday, his dad paid for his three best friends to come out to the Egbert home in Washington, and the second he laid eyes on them in person for the first time, John felt that familiar chill wash over him. This was not the first time, he knew. He held Jade in his arms a little longer than Dave or Rose, feeling a bond he knew somehow was only shared between siblings. He held Rose’s hand as they walked around the lake near his house on a nature walk, hanging back as Jade and Dave hunted for bullfrogs on the shore, and he felt a sorrow and longing in her that he, too understood somehow. And seeing Dave next to Rose, he couldn’t help but notice their shared mannerisms, the similarities in the shape of their noses and the tone of their skin, freckles and all. They were like a mirror image of the same person, with very slight differences. During that trip, John felt soothed; they were all together, now, but it felt like someone was missing. Maybe several someones. 

Then, he was alone with Dave.

Dave, chatterbox though he was online, was curiously quiet in person. John was shocked to find that the confidence and cool were a facade, hiding the deep-rooted anxiety inside him. The boys liked poking fun at each other, and played pranks on each other the entire trip. Kool-Aid powder in a shampoo bottle turned Dave’s flaxen hair a lovely slime green. A bucket of water balanced on the door frame nearly destroyed John’s brand new cellphone, a birthday gift from his Dad. It was fun cutting up together, and showing off in front of the girls was a plus, as Jade and Rose were always entertained by their shenanigans (or, if nothing else, they pretended convincingly enough). It was when they were alone together that John really saw Dave for who he was. The two of them stayed up late one night, sneaking a tiny baggie of shitty weed they had bought from a senior at John’s high school. While they were giggling and staring up at the stars from the balcony, a shooting star streaked across the sky. Dave fell quiet. Then, he started to cry. In the darkness, he whispered to john, “Do you ever feel like you miss someone that you’ve never met? Maybe somebody that doesn’t even exist?”

John did know. It was like coming home from a long trip, only to discover that his house had been ransacked; things were missing, things he knew were important, yet he couldn’t put his finger on what they were. Some days, when Dad was at work, John would wander the house, trying to remember…what? He felt like something catastrophic had happened while he was unconscious, and everyone around him was hiding the evidence of it. Like the whole house had burnt down and been rebuilt with similar, but not quite the same stuff. Even Dad didn’t feel the same sometimes.

“I don’t know what to say, Dave,” John, back in the present, finally said, admitting defeat. What could he say? There were too many gaps.

Dave just nodded. He didn’t either, really. His chest, now that his heart no longer raced in there, was achingly hollow. A loneliness gripped him like he hadn’t felt in so long. A lump grew in his throat, and his eyes felt hot and achy with tears he felt he couldn’t shed. Against his best judgement, Dave leaned his shoulder into his best friend’s, turned his face into John’s neck. He could feel John relax into his touch, and for once, the anxiety around physical contact was gone, and replaced with an urgent need. Without a word, Dave twisted around and wrapped his free arm around John, clinging to him with the awkwardness of someone who doesn’t quite understand human connection. John did his best to shift his position to make them both more comfortable. Their arms wrapped around each other, John’s head rested on top of Dave’s. Sometimes, he thought, watching Dave navigate the world was like watching a kicked puppy trying to find enough scraps to survive on. Clearly, he was lonely. John knew that was a loneliness that had lived in his best friend for his entire life. He squeezed tighter. ‘If I hold onto him hard enough, maybe he won’t hurt anymore,’ John thought.

Dave shuddered out a sigh, and squeezed back. It felt like a homecoming. It felt like he should be rejoicing, and yet, he couldn’t shake that feeling that was always there; like he was grieving a love he couldn’t even recall. With his eyes closed, Dave pictured the grey-skinned hand, the glint of that fanged grin. He focused hard. He remembered little flashes; an argument, a gravelly voice, a first kiss that never happened. A name that felt so good in his mouth, yet his lips and tongue couldn’t make the syllables. He realized, eventually, that he was crying, and when the heat of the tears registered, a sob bubbled out. Then another. John held tighter, and the floodgates opened. Dave had never cried like that before, and it was an odd feeling. He felt like he was getting rid of years of baggage, and yet, the weight of his heartache was still the same.

The rain pelted against the shingles, almost loud enough to drown out the sounds of their grief. John had begun to cry too. He sniffled and stroked his best friend’s white-blonde hair, rocking gently to soothe him, like Dad had done for him so many times before. He knew Dave had never had that before, and was willing to give it, but it felt wrong to hold him like this. It felt like he had something to hide, an ulterior motive, almost, just because he had wanted this closeness so long. John’s feelings were jumbled, and they only felt more tangled when Dave mentioned that boy. Something was prickling the back of John’s mind, like he was close to finally piecing the puzzle together, even when none of the edges matched up. Whatever had happened all that time ago, it was over now, and there was nothing left to do but pick the pieces up. Eventually the drum of raindrops lulled the two of them back to sleep, still curled up together in Dave’s bed. The nightmare didn’t return, and though neither would admit it, both slept better than they had in years.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Betas come together for a special event at the Egbert house. John and Dave have a breakthrough.

A few months passed, and Dave was sitting by himself in a mostly empty airport earlier in the morning than he ever wanted to be awake. Work had been insane; photography was always in demand, and Dave was better at his craft than he would admit to most. The trip he was returning from had lasted almost a month and had worn him to the bone running back and forth from shoot to shoot. At night, for the first time in a long time, Dave had been snoring the second his head hit the hotel pillow. He still only averaged a couple hours of solid sleep, though; He was not typically a sound sleeper, and a combination of anxiety and caffeine kept him awake at weird hours, editing photos or drawing dumb shit on his iPad. The nightmares still came, and they hit harder when he was alone and away from home. He was ready to get home to a bed, but he knew he was not likely to get much sleep then, either, as it was a special occasion; his birthday. Moving in with John had taught Dave for the first time in his life what it was like to appreciate his birthday. It was hard not to, when the Egberts got so excited for them. John’s dad was an incredible baker, and Dave couldn’t wait for a slice of homemade birthday cake, a hot shower, and a nap. This was a special year, too; twenty-five, John insisted, was a milestone, and a cause for an extra special celebration. As such, Rose and Jade would be coming to visit as well, and the four of them could celebrate their close-clustered birthdays together. John was the odd one out, being the youngest, and had had his birthday already that April. They would be remiss to exclude him, though; John was, after all, the life of the party, most of the time. 

For once, Dave thought, as he sipped his airport coffee, watching fat snowflakes drift down from the sky, he didn't feel like his life was falling apart. In fact, he was beginning to think that it was the most together things had ever been for him. The problem wasn’t with work, or even with his mental health; his therapist had given him a shining review at their last session, and Dave walked out of her office with a pep in his step. 

The problem that was arising was that, as Dave put it, some of his coding got scrambled on the return journey from whatever happened all those years ago.

Over the course of the past months, Dave had begun piecing together more details of his strange phantom memories. John had begun opening up more as well, and the two of them had started a sort of joint dream journal in which they compared similarities. Jade had been the least resistant to the idea of solving the mystery, and frequently checked in with new dreams and odd details (as usual, they eerily matched many of the points the boys shared). Rose refused to speak on it most of the time, and would shut down any attempts at prying into her subconscious. John liked to joke about this, as she was so often the psychoanalyst of the group, and now the roles were reversed, she was balking. Dave didn’t see much humor in it; he hated that Rose wouldn’t talk to him about it. Somehow, he felt that the two of them shared a similar, deep pain, and it upset him that they couldn’t work through their shared trauma together.

John had had a major breakthrough right before the trip, and they all felt a puzzle piece click into place at the name he plucked from some dark corner of his mind: Sburb. It was a video game, they knew, that John had received in the mail on his birthday and convinced his three best friends to join in on. This discovery was monumental, and unblocked a new subset of nightmares; Before this trip, there was a long stretch where Dave woke up trembling most nights, covered in sweat and struggling to pull out of a night terror full of imps, snarling black dogs, creatures with inky black shells for skin, and a sprawling purple city in flames outside his bedroom window. The four of them were so young before it all happened, and it left deep enough scars on their preteen brains that they all had to spend more than enough time sitting in dingy therapist’s offices. Dave tried his hardest not to be a smartass when his would ask “And how did that make you feel?” as if she could ever understand. He tried to ignore the condescending look on her face when he described monsters that he knew were formed in some dark corner of his brain, probably to cover up some other trauma happening in real life that he couldn't conjure up. Often, she would explain that the human brain was fragile, and created things to keep us safe. Dave knew that was true for some, but for himself, he called bullshit. That always made her angry, try as she might to pretend she wasn't. 

She thought Dave was crazy. Then again, so did Dave.

But now, his life was more or less on track. He had money and stability, thanks to his job, and his friends were all safe and nearby. Jade was down the coast in a remote area of California, near Mexico, researching the local wildlife. Rose lived in an isolated art deco dream house in Oregon, and had spent the past six months on a nationwide book tour selling what John and Dave lovingly referred to as "wizard porn." His body was beginning to feel strong again, and he no longer felt the seconds ticking by so intensely. The feeling that his sand was piling up too fast in the bottom of his glass was no longer pressing on the back of his mind. Sometimes, though, the normal world threw him for a loop. He often found himself staring dazedly out the window and wondering why the sky was blue, not black. His eyes sought out nonexistent crocodile consorts on his commute home, and sometimes when he woke in the night, bedclothes felt foreign to him, as did the coolness of the air conditioning pouring into his bedroom. Those nights, he ran shaky hands over the smooth cotton sheets, and in that half-asleep state of bewilderment, he could almost remember what it was like drifting to sleep with the hazy heat rising off an ocean of lava as it lapped against the crude metal stilts of an extraterrestrial city’s buildings. Almost.

As Dave was beginning to doze in his uncomfortable chair, his phone rang. The contact name read “Zoosmell Pooplord,” which, of course, was John. He answered and listened quietly as John wished him a happy birthday, then yapped on and on about the cake his dad was making and other details of the impending festivities. Occasionally, Dave would offer something up to the conversation, but eventually John noticed his quietness. 

“What’s wrong dude?”

“Nothing. Just old and tired, Egbert.” Dave replied with a yawn for emphasis. 

“Bullshit. When’s the last time you had a nightmare, Dave? Have you been keeping contact with your doctor?”

Dave sighed heavily. “John, c’mon, don’t be such a stick in the ass. It’s my birthday, can’t we just go without the feelings for one- “

“No.” His sternness caught Dave off guard. “No, you need to be talking to someone. C’mon, dude, just tell me what’s up.”

Dave was unsure how to reply. John was always the caretaker type. He never asked for the influence he had, but somehow his goofy ass managed to get his shit together the best. Or keep together what little shit he had, anyway. He had always been the leader of their foursome, Dave thought. The thing was, though, he rarely tried to use the influence he had to boss anyone around, and his demand on this particular day, of all days, knocked Dave for a bit of a loop.

“I…Er…” Dave stammered, and felt the flush rise in his cheeks; he could almost feel Bro’s silent judgement and the _whap_ of a hand on the back of his head he would get for muttering and stuttering. The thought made him cringe and glance over his shoulder, an instinct he’d carried with him since childhood. “I’ve just not been sleeping as well as I could. That’s all.”

“Because of your nightmares,” he says, in that ‘duhh’ sort of tone that Dave knew was accompanied by an eyeroll. Dave could hear a scraping sound in the background, like John was pulling out a kitchen chair and plunking himself down in it. “Alright, look,” he said, sounding sort of exasperated. Dave could practically hear the hand he knew John was raking through his curly black hair. “If it’s any consolation, Dave, I still have them too. Rose and Jade too! Just because we haven’t been talking about them much, doesn’t mean they’re gone. Work is no excuse for you to push this away.”

“Right, John, because it makes me feel downright warm and fuzzy inside knowing that my best friends still share in my stupid PTSD dreamscape night terror bullshit,” he huffed. 

“You know what I mean,” John huffed back. He was quiet for long enough that Dave was about to ask if he was still on the line. When he spoke again, John was quieter than before. “Listen, Dave, I…if I’m putting too much pressure on you, you can tell me. You seem to have the worst of this. I’m sorry. I just want to know the truth. We can figure this out if we work together!”

Dave could feel his gut twisting nervously. “I want to know too,” he mumbled, staring down at his dirty red sneakers. “there are pieces that I have to make sense of by myself, I think.”

Again, john was quiet a long time. “Dave, there’s something I need to tell you. I had another dream. It might give you some answers. But I’m not telling you about it until you get here. When does your flight land?”

“Aw, come on, John, that’s not—”

“Don’t push it. What time?”

Dave sighed. “I board at nine, should be there by noon.”

“Okay, good. Do me a favor. Try and get some sleep on the plane. We have big plans for you! Seriously, Dad went all out on the cake this year! Twenty-five is a big birthday!”

Dave managed a small smile, even though he knew John couldn’t see it. He had been saying that for weeks, any time said birthday came up in conversation. “Sure, I’ll try,” he said. “I’ll see you at noon. Don’t forget to pick me up.”

“No promises!”

Sleep of course continued to evade him, and Dave spent his whole flight staring out the window and bouncing his knee anxiously. Had he been able to focus on anything around him, he would have been grateful for the fact that he had no middle seat mate this trip. They would fucking hate him for his fidgeting. What could John possibly know? What did it mean for him? What did it mean for all four of them? Dave could only think about the blurry face from his dreams, with its glowing catlike eyes and warm grey skin. It was him. He knew in his gut it was.

Dave was still daydreaming about this new information as he wheeled his suitcase away from baggage claim, ready to find John. His eyes scanned the crowd for his best friend’s face. Unfortunately, in his distraction, Dave bumped hard into a woman, and dropped his camera bag off his shoulder. Alarmed, he began apologizing profusely and reached out to steady her, only to be met with a familiar face.

“Rose??”

There she was, with her prim black-lipsticked smirk and her violet eyes. Rose was as striking as ever, tall and willowy with high cheekbones and soft curls like her mother. Dave had often been told the two of them could be siblings, due to their matching freckles and snowy-white hair. Their shared birthday had prompted them to tell anyone who bothered to ask that they were twins. Years ago, now, she had given up the thin black headband she always wore as a child, and today she was wearing a luxurious lavender silk headscarf to keep her bangs away from her face. She reached out a well-manicured hand and picked up his camera bag, putting it over her own shoulder. “Hello, Dave. Good to see you again. Happy birthday.”

He blinked in disbelief a few times before laughing and patting her on the shoulder. “Happy birthday to you too, little sister. I wasn’t sure you would make time for us common folk this year.” 

Rose narrowed her eyes at him, still giving him her trademark mischievous smirk, and offered her hand to him. “Thank you. Now come along, I suspect the Egberts are getting tired of waiting on us. Though I would be so inclined to be fashionably late to my own special day, wouldn’t you? Think of the scandal it would cause.”

Dave didn’t accept her outstretched hand, instead making an “after you” gesture, and he and Rose made their way to their pickup. John was waiting for them with an oversized poster board with “HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAVE AND ROSE” written on it in glitter glue. Behind him, grinning widely, was Jade. She held an obnoxiously large balloon bouquet in one hand and an even more obnoxiously large teddy bear in the other. The bear was wearing a party hat. There was a round of hugs and "happy birthdays", and then the four friends bundled out the door into the snow. The car ride home was filled with chatter, mostly on Jade and John’s behalf, as they had spent a full day together already and had lots to catch the newcomers up on. Dave smiled as he stared out the window at the snow whirling around them. Despite it only being mid-afternoon, the sun was hidden by slate-grey clouds, and the flakes were driving with the harsh wind. 

_“Dave, look, there’s one! Grab him!” Jade cried out._

_Dave lunged for the frog but was too late; it hopped out of reach as he landed heavily on his belly in the snow, cursing. The damn things were just so fast, and huge too. He had never seen frogs this big before, even back home in Texas. Nothing could have prepared them for what they would find on the planets in their session, and this was just one weird little detail out of thousands._

_“It’s okay, we’ll get him next time! There’s plenty more around here,” Jade said, hiking the skirt of her gown up so she could walk through the snowdrifts. She looked like she was going to a fancy dinner party, draped in black satin drenched with neon green glitter. The dress itself seemed to crackle with life, like a radioactive generator. Dave couldn’t believe how beautiful she looked. He also couldn’t believe she wasn’t freezing to death in a strapless gown in this weather, but hey, some folks are just more resilient, he reckoned._

“Dave? Did you hear me?”

Dave snapped out of his vision, turning to look at Jade. she was sitting in the back seat with rose, while Dave rode shotgun (a position he had won in a fierce and very close rock-paper-scissors match with Rose). She was looking at him, a hint of concern in her eyes. “No, sorry. What did you say?” he replied.

“I asked how the new job was going! Can you show us some of your photos when we get home? Ooh, maybe we can all take some together while we’re together! We don’t exactly have any proper family photos anymore," she beamed at him, and her grin was contagious. Dave felt warmed by her presence, and smiled back at her. 

“Just the one we took on my sixteenth,” John said with a chuckle. “I gotta say, we were a homely little group of dorks. Now that we’re in our prime, we have to take some glamour shots. My good looks aren’t going to last forever!” 

Dave laughed. “Yeah, I’ll see what I can do. Might be able to work some of my magic. We can put ‘em on a Christmas card.”

A few minutes later, the car pulled into John’s driveway, and the four of them piled out. Jade and John insisted on carrying as much luggage as possible, leaving the teddy bear and decorations to Dave and Rose. The foursome made their way up the driveway, and saw Dad standing in the doorway waiting for them. Dave felt a small smile come to his face. Dad had been so good to him all these years. He had really shown Dave what it was like to have a parent that gave a shit, and he was grateful. He still couldn’t help but feel awkward around him, but that was getting better with time, too.

“Welcome home everyone!” Dad called out, a smile in his voice. Jade bounded forward to give him a big hug, the two of them laughing as they embraced. Rose was next, a more formal and polite embrace than Jade’s, and gave Mr. Egbert a kiss on the cheek. Dave was next in line, but the two of them had a different routine; handshake and nod, like “old fashioned gentlemen,” as Dad would tease. He understood Dave’s aversion to touch, joking aside, and was as accommodating as he could be. Dave was very grateful for that fact.

“Come in, come in, it’s getting cold out here!” Dad led the way into the house, helping John carry in a couple of the bags. The Egbert house was large and welcoming, and as always, smelled strongly of baked goods. A fire roared in the hearth, and Dave made a beeline for it; even after years of living in the pacific northwest, Dave was still not a fan of the cold. He shivered and held his hands close to the flames, letting his fingertips warm up. 

“Boy, I haven’t had a house this full in ages!” Dad exclaimed, as he helped John drag the suitcases up the stairs to the guest room. “I must admit, it gets a bit lonely here with John grown and living on his own now.”

“Oh, come on, Dad! I’m here like every weekend!” John protested. 

“Well, yes, but you used to be here every day!” Their voices faded as they rounded the corner. Dave smiled to himself. 

“Well, hello there, David.” 

The voice made him jump nearly out of his skin, and Dave whipped around. There stood Rose’s mother, a smile curling her painted lips. She held a glass of wine in one hand and swirled the red liquid idly as she looked him up and down. She was wearing glasses, now, and delicate crow’s feet crinkled at the corners of her eyes. 

“Hello, miss Lalonde,” he said, trying not to sound shocked. “I wasn’t expecting you to come.”

“Well, my dear, this is a special occasion, after all,” she said, her laughter like the tinkling of bells. “My darling Rose is growing up, and so are you all. This was an occasion I just couldn’t be absent for. And besides,” she grinned slyly, conspiratorially, and glanced across the room at Rose, who was chatting with Jade in the kitchen, out of earshot. “I always revel in a chance to spend some one on one time with Mr. Egbert.” 

Dave tried not to make a face. He knew there were some feelings there but preferred not to ask what they were. It felt weird, like he was looking in on someone’s life that he didn’t belong in. He nodded and changed the subject. “Well, it’s good to see you. Been a long time. Would you excuse me? I’ve got serious jet lag, and I could use a nap.”

Dad was descending the stairs as Dave approached them, and the two shared a smile and a nod. Mr. Egbert patted Dave on the shoulder as they passed each other. The gesture made Dave soften a bit. He was anxious to be around so many people, even ones he knew so intimately. “Dinner is at six, son. Go get some rest.”

Dave reached the top of the landing and walked slowly down the hall to John’s room. The boys had always shared a room on these visits, while the girls took the guest room. They usually ended up all together in John’s room by the end of the night, piled up together on the bed and on blankets on the floor after hours spent talking and catching up. He opened the door, and found John sitting on the edge of his mattress, holding a photo frame in his hands. He looked up as Dave entered.

“Sorry,” Dave said. “Am I interrupting?”

“Uh, duh,” John said with a teasing smile. “Jeez, Dave, don’t you know how to knock?”

“Well, I didn’t expect you to be spanking it within seconds of our arrival home,” Dave countered, smirking. “Have some decency, Egbert. It’s my birthday.”

John rolled his eyes and placed the frame back on his bedside table. The picture inside was the one Jade was talking about in the car: the four of them, sixteen years old, standing on the lake shore while grinning and posing. Jade held a fat bullfrog in her hands, lifting him aloft like a trophy, and John had his arms around his three best friends, mouth wide with laughter. He always was the one holding them all together. The rest of the room, upon inspection, wasn’t much different than it had been ten years ago; most of the posters were still there, though Dad had bought them some nice frames (Dave thought this was hilarious, personally; who the hell frames a Con Air poster, much less one of Little Monsters?) and the bed was larger. John’s first high school growth spurt had quickly made the old twin mattress way too small, and his feet hung off the end. The Egberts had swapped it out for a nice queen bed with a pair of refined, grown-up looking lamps on nightstands on either side, which were a bit of a contrast to the rest of the room’s decor. John’s old PC sat on its desk, turned off and coated with a thin layer of dust. 

“Is everything ok Dave?” John asked, snapping Dave out of a daze he didn’t realize he had fallen into. 

“Yeah,” he replied. “Yeah, just tired.”

John patted the bed next to him. “Come sit. You look exhausted.”

Dave did as he was asked and sat next to his friend on the mattress. For a while, they were quiet. He felt the anxiety from their earlier phone call rise in his gut again, and he was just about to speak, when John piped up first.

“I remember his name,” John said softly, not making eye contact. “I dreamt about him last night.”

“You did?” Dave asked, voice just as hushed as John’s. It felt like a secret. His heart hiccuped and his stomach twisted, but he tried to keep calm.

“Karkat Vantas.”

The wind knocked itself out of Dave, like he had been kicked in the gut. He wrapped his arms around his stomach and folded over, staring at the floor. Flashes came back to him now; an angry, gravelly voice, screaming curses. Arguments, heated as can be, but over what he couldn't remember. Everything, it seemed. A scuffle, wrestling with an inhumanly hot body. A first kiss, clawed fingers raking through Dave's hair. Glowing red-gold eyes.

“Dude, you’re crying.”

He barely heard John’s voice. Dave drew in a sharp breath and covered his mouth with his hand. He squeezed his eyes shut. That hollow feeling was back, like a part of him was gone that he couldn’t remember. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled, wiping tears away under his shades. He wanted to scream, to let it out, but as usual, he couldn’t let himself. He had to hold it in, to suck it up. He’d already shown too much weakness. If his brother were still around, Dave knew he would be due for an ass kicking for acting like such a pussy.

John put a hand on Dave’s shoulder. Dave flinched away, then reconsidered. He looked at John. He looked nervous, and hurt; his thick brows furrowed, and a frown curled the corners of his lips down. Guilt curled in Dave’s gut, and he opened his mouth to apologize. 

“Don’t,” John said, shaking his head. “I know what you’re going to say. It’s not something to apologize for, Dave. You are allowed to have feelings, and your brother was a total dick for trying to make you not have them! Besides, there…there’s something else.”

“Something else?” Dave asked quietly, though he felt it coming. He knew. He remembered, though it was still unclear. He remembered how it felt. He could almost taste that kiss the more he thought about it. 

“He was your…boyfriend, I guess,” John said. His voice had an emotion in it Dave couldn’t discern. “I don’t know if that’s the word for it. Aliens probably don’t have gender roles like we do, right?” he tried to make it sound like a joke, but that tone was still there. Like there was a sadness he was trying to cover up.

“What happened in the dream?” Dave asked. His voice still trembled, but he had regained most of his composure. He kept his gaze aimed at the floor, knowing if he looked at John he would crumble again, and he was already embarrassed enough.

“We were on a meteor together,” John began. He pulled his hand away and folded them in his lap. “I don’t know how I knew what it was. We were in some kind of building, like a bunker. It was really cold and metal, like some kind of…I dunno, a military ship? And we were talking. I think it was the first time we were all together. You, me, Jade, Rose, a bunch of others. They're still blurry, but I remember him. I get the impression that I hadn’t seen you in years.”

Years…Dave felt a twinge of pain in his temple, and scrunched his face, pressing on the throbbing pain with his fingers. Something was coming to him; he could feel it. He remembered the cold, the metal, the vastness of space whooshing by. 

“We were talking about a lot of things, like we had a lot to catch up on, but I don’t remember really. Something…something like a war, I guess. And he said something about hitting on me?? You seemed a bit offended by that, heh,” he sighed, and smiled. “It felt almost like the first time you and I met in person. We talked it out. And then things kind of took a weird turn? We were talking about feelings and stuff. You gave me a sort of…how to put this. A pep talk about my sexuality?”

At that, Dave started laughing. It burst out of him, unexpectedly, and he couldn’t stop it. He remembered, suddenly, the awkwardness, the feelings. He remembered it clearly, sitting together on the floor, cross-legged, a trio of pimply-faced teenagers bumbling through life. John looked shocked to see him laughing for a second, then softened into a smile, then he laughed a little too. Dave wiped tears away again, but this time, they were happy ones. “I remember,” he said finally. “I remember that. That was real. He was real.”

“Very real,” John said, and the two of them faded into a warm silence. “It made me think. It made me realize some things about myself.”

Dave looked up, making eye contact with John. He remembered John at sixteen, scrawny, getting taller by the day. He remembered seeing him that night, on the meteor. He remembered that weird getup that John wore, with the long windsock hood. He remembered a huge hammer, like some kind of whack-a-mole mallet made for a clown. It seemed so absurd, but he knew it was real. “Are we losing it, John?”

“No,” John replied. His hand, shaking a bit, reached out, and took Dave’s. Dave's instinct, as always, was to pull away, but he thought better of it. His heart still ached, but differently now. Not just with loneliness, but with longing. Dave finally looked up, and made eye contact with John. “Stupid as it sounds, I feel kind of like we’re finding it, actually.”

Dave didn’t realize he was kissing his best friend until he was pulling away, clapping his hands over his mouth and flushing bright red with embarrassment. _Did I really just do that?_ He thought, staring at John in horror. 

The shock on John’s face was apparent, but he didn’t seem upset. Slowly, dazedly, he reached up and touched his own lips, still staring at Dave. Had that _really_ just happened?

“I-I’m so sorry, oh fuck, John, I didn’t mean—”

John reached out, cupping Dave’s cheek in his big hand. Dave’s heart raced as he cut himself off mid-apology, and his hands uncovered his mouth. He reached out and touched John’s face too, mirroring his friend’s action. John's jaw was square and stubbly, no matter how much he shaved these days. His nose was straight, his cheekbones high and angular. He had changed so much, yet he was still the same. The only constant in Dave’s life anymore, his best friend of near fifteen years. They hadn’t so much been through the ringer, Dave was realizing, as they were still in the thick of it together. 

“Can I kiss you?” John asked, his voice low and level, like he was afraid of scaring away a skittish animal.

Dave nodded as their lips were already meeting. It felt like a homecoming, like something lost for ages was found again. For so long, Dave had spent his life wound tight, protecting himself from pain by avoiding being open. He loved his friends, sure, but years of trauma had closed him off from the world. John was Dave’s buoy in the ocean, a lighthouse in a storm. Tears ran down Dave’s cheeks, and he berated himself internally for going soft, even as he tangled his fingers in John’s curly hair. How much more could he possibly cry? How long had he secretly wanted this? How long had Dave stared at his best friend from across the kitchen, wondering what John’s lips would feel like on his? How many nights since that storm had he told himself it was still platonic love, even when he would crawl into John’s bed at night after a bad dream, terrified to be alone? 

“Oh, goodness, I’m sorry, I—”

Dave pulled away quickly, whipping around to face the voice from the doorway. John’s Dad was standing at the threshold, poised to knock on the half open door, eyes wide with surprise. Dave leapt to his feet, bristling with fear. Bro had walked in on him once, kissing a boy from his high school, and had decided the proper response was corporal punishment, as he often did. Dad was always kindhearted, but what if that changed?

“Dad!” John exclaimed. “What the hell!” 

“I’ll come back later,” he called, already pulling the door closed and disappearing back down the hallway. 

As soon as he was gone, John took Dave’s hand again. “Hey, dude, relax, we’re fine. You know my dad isn’t gonna be a dick.”

Still shaking, Dave nodded and sat back down. He felt exhaustion wash over him again, and he suddenly remembered just how tired he was. “I need to sleep,” he replied dazedly. "I've been up for so long."

John nodded in agreement. He was clearly trying to keep his own cool. “I’ll let you be, then—” 

“Wait,” Dave cut him off, grabbing John's sleeve before he could stand to leave. “Will you stay? Until I fall asleep?”

John hesitated, then smiled, resisting the urge to tease him further. Dave was clearly getting loopy, and it felt unfair to leave him. He so rarely asked, anyway. This was a breakthrough, and John knew it; his friend was making leaps and bounds in learning how to be less...robotic, he guessed. Instead, John stood and flipped the blanket back, gesturing for Dave to make himself comfortable. He was still in his travel clothes, so he stripped down to his t-shirt and boxers. John waited for him to crawl under the covers, then climbed in next to him. “Just till you fall asleep.”

The last thing Dave could remember was hearing John start to snore beside him, and smiling to himself as he drifted off as well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so! I don't really know what I'm doing with this yet, and am just winging it. As I said, this is just for fun, so please don't roast me too hard for my grammar or any of that shit. I'm doing my best. 
> 
> If you enjoy it, please leave some kudos and stroke my ego.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Betas celebrate their birthdays. John stirs up old memories.

Dave didn’t realize how soundly he had actually been sleeping until he was woken by the ringing of a cell phone. For a moment, he actually felt rested. Stretching and rubbing his eyes blearily, he noticed that John was still lying next to him, and he was beginning to stir himself. He sat up and leaned over his friend to the nightstand to grab his cell phone. The screen read “Unknown Number.”

“Who is it?” John asked, yawning as Dave sat back against the headboard. 

“Dunno. Lets see,” Dave replied, tapping the little green phone icon. “Hello?”

“Hey, little brother.”

Dave nearly dropped the phone. He sat up ramrod straight, his face shifting into an emotionless mask. Even after all these years of no contact, Dave reverted back to his defensive posture instinctually. It had been nearly five years since he had heard that voice, and he had hoped he never would again.

“What do you want?” Dave snapped. He didn’t dare look at John, but his friend was already sitting up beside him and watching intently. Surely he had heard Bro’s voice, too. 

“What, I can’t call my baby brother on his birthday? Fuckin’ sue me,” Bro snapped back. Dave heard him cough hard for a few seconds, then spit. He scowled. “It’s your twenty-fifth, aint it? Wanted to see if you was a man yet.”

Dave kept his pokerface up, though he trembled with anger. “Nah, couldn’t be me. Not by your impossible standards anyway, big man.” 

A wheezing laugh rattled across the line. It made Dave sick. Every second longer that he was on the call, he felt his anger mount. How dare he ruin his day like this? Worse, how dare he wake him from the first restful sleep he’d had in ages? It was like he had sensed Dave’s happiness and had to pop up again to ruin it. “Is that all you have to say to me, Bro? I have things to do that don’t involve your crusty old ass. Why don’t you hobble on down to the rec hall with the rest of the senior citizens and do shots of prune juice till you’re less constipated? They’ll appreciate your presence a lot more than I ever fuckin’ would.” 

Again, with that raspy laugh. “Oh, lord, you sure are a peach, ain’t ya? You think you’re big now, but you know better than to say that bullshit to my face, kid. You’re just as much a weakling now as you ever were. Lord knows I tried with you and look at you. I tried my best to toughen you up, and you’re still a fuckin’ disappointment. Still soft.” 

Dave gripped the sheets in his fist and bit his tongue. His blood burnt hot in his cheeks. He could tell John could hear and was resisting the urge to snatch the phone away and give Bro a piece of his mind. “Yep, that’s one thing that’ll never change. I’ll never be able to live up to whatever stupid legacy you think you’re leaving behind. But hey, at least I won’t die alone like someone else I can think of,” Bro took a breath to reply and Dave felt a thrill wash down his spine as he cut him off. “Do me a favor: never fucking call this number again. Have the Devil send me a postcard when you get to hell.” Without waiting for a response, Dave ended the call and threw his phone onto the bed.

The two sat in silence for a few minutes. Dave’s adrenaline was pumping, and he massaged his temples to try and calm his rage. He’d never told his brother off like that. It felt incredible, even while his stomach soured with panic. The conditioning was still there that he should be afraid, that he should expect a beat down. But he knew Bro couldn’t touch him now. It was a high he hadn’t felt since he left home all those years ago.

“Well,” John began, clearing his throat awkwardly. “I guess that’s as good a way to start off the party as any.”

Dave turned back to look at John. The two only managed a couple seconds of stone-faced seriousness before they burst into peals of laughter. “You really told your brother to go shit himself,” John wheezed, and the two of them giggled themselves to tears.

There was a knock at the door as the cacophony died down. “Come in,” John called out, still wiping his eyes. 

Jade poked her head through the door, then grinned, and flung it open. Rose stood behind her, arms crossed and smirking as always. Neither of them acknowledged the fact that the two boys were in bed together, when they all knew John typically gave Dave the bed and slept on the floor. Rose gave Dave a knowing look, though, and he cursed himself internally, knowing they would have that conversation much later, when Rose could get him alone and pick his brain. 

“You guys were asleep forever!” Jade complained, skipping over to plop down on the mattress beside John. Rose followed, sitting daintily on the edge of the bed opposite Dave and smoothing her skirt as she crossed her legs. “I figured Dave would need a nap, but come on John, you actually have a normal sleep schedule!”

“Oh please, that’s fresh coming from someone with narcolepsy!” John teased, shoving Jade’s shoulder. They pushed each other back and forth for a couple rounds, like a couple of toddlers in a sandbox, and ended the argument by sticking their tongues out at each other and seeing who could blow a bigger raspberry. Jade seemed to win.

Exasperated and caught in a slightly slobbery crossfire, Dave looked at Rose and shook his head. “How old are we turning again? Five?”

Rose chuckled as John turned on Dave, shoving him too. He laughed and shoved John back, tucking and rolling out of the bed before John could have a chance to retaliate. He looked at the clock on his cell phone, and was a bit shocked to see that the display said it was 6:37 PM. 

“I thought dinner was at six? Your Dad’s never late.”

“He wanted to wait for you, so we pushed it back to seven. He said you seemed like you could really use the rest,” Jade answered. 

Dave felt his ears get hot as he turned and busied himself with opening his suitcase. He knew that John’s Dad wasn’t exactly the gossipy type, so he was sure he hadn’t told the girls what he had seen, but he still worried they had picked up on it. Rose clearly had and was courteous enough to be coy about it, and Jade usually was as intuitive as her, if not more so. Dave unzipped the suitcase and was met with a crumpled mess of already worn clothes on top. He sighed and cursed his terrible organizational skills. “I really need to do laundry,” he muttered, digging under the pile for a clean, folded pair of pants and a fresh shirt. He dressed quickly as the other three chatted in the background, then turned and stretched out his arms to display his outfit. “How’s this?” he asked.

Jade cocked her head to the side as she looked him over. Rose raised one delicate brow. Dave then saw himself in the mirror. The t-shirt he had on had a hole in the neck, much larger than he had thought initially. The pants were okay, but his hair was still rumpled with sleep. He looked a bit like a disgruntled cockatiel without his glasses on. 

John laughed, and went to his closet. He produced a red and black checked flannel that Dave didn’t recognize. It clearly wasn’t John’s size, and it didn’t really match his usual style, either. 

“Here, Dad got you this. There’s a couple nice t-shirts here, too. You should probably throw that one in the trash, it looks sort of gross.” 

Dave looked down at the raggedy t-shirt. Sure, it was stained, and that hole was an eyesore, but he loved that shirt. It was emblazoned with a tacky logo of a cartoon pig wearing an apron and a chef’s hat, the sigil of his favorite barbecue joint back home. He blushed as John handed him the selections from the closet. His Dad had been buying him clothes? Dave was surprised by the fatherly gesture, but grateful, and he changed quickly, slyly tucking the shaggy shirt back into his luggage while the other three returned to their conversation. Like hell he was going to throw it out. Once again, he turned to his friends, arms outstretched. “How ‘bout now?”

“Much better,” Rose said, looking genuinely relieved. She stood and approached Dave, delicately smoothing out the mess of his hair. “Now. Could we please direct our attention to the festivities downstairs before my mother further embarrasses herself in front of your father, John?” 

John laughed, a bit uneasily. He still wasn’t sure what to make of their guardians’ affection for each other, either. “Sure. I’m starving! Let’s go.”

The four of them filed out of the room and descended the stairs. Dave was last in line, and when the smell of whatever Mr. Egbert had been cooking hit him, he heard his stomach growl audibly. It was loud enough that John heard and turned to look at him in disbelief. “Jesus, Dave, when’s the last time you ate?”

He thought for a second but could only remember that sad cup of airport coffee from all those hours ago. The face he made at the thought was answer enough for John, who rolled his eyes and grabbed Dave’s arm. “C’mon, if Dad hears that he’ll try to force feed you or something.”

The saloon doors to the kitchen swung open, and the four friends made their way into the dining area. Dad was at the table already, sipping wine and chatting with Miss Lalonde. He looked up as they entered and flashed them a bright smile, crow's feet crinkling up at the edges of his vibrant blue eyes. “Well, hello children. I hope you’re hungry!”

Dinner was a blur of idle conversation and laughter. They shared a toast, following which Dave ate a plate and a half of food before remembering whose house he was in, and watched in horror as Mr. Egbert brought out the showstopper of a birthday cake. It was massive, two tiers of chocolate frosting with those candles on top that were impossible to blow out. Jade, Dave, and Rose tried their best anyway as the Egberts and Miss Lalonde sang happy birthday to the trio. The cake was cut, wine was sipped, and things were beginning to wind down as the moon rose high in the night sky, visible through the kitchen window. Dave gazed out the pane of foggy glass at the front yard, warm and fuzzy from the alcohol. He could see John’s old tire swing hanging from its branch, swaying gently in the breeze. 

“Here you are, Dave.”

He blinked and looked up. John's Dad was standing at his side with a small, wrapped package in his extended hand. Dave was surprised. “Is that for me?”

“Haha, who else, Dave? Geez, maybe you needed an even longer nap,” John teased from across the table.

“Yes, son, it’s for you,” Dad replied, ignoring John’s snark. “Happy birthday.”

Dave took the package gingerly. Looking around, he noticed that Jade and Rose were holding similar packages. John sat with his chin in his hands, smiling across the table at Dave. “Go on! Open them! I helped pick them out, of course.”

Dave wasn’t sure what to do at first. He always felt weird accepting gifts, but the Egberts were, like, stupid good at gift giving. Carefully he started tearing the paper off, revealing a velvet box. Dave opened it and was surprised to see a gold watch inside. Its face was dark, with concentric circles etched into it that expanded out from the center like ripples on a dark pond. Each notch denoting the number of minutes was a tiny fleck of ruby. It looked like it was worth some serious cash. He didn’t know what to say. It was gorgeous.

“Wow,” Dave said quietly, unable to take his eyes off it. He could hear Jade and Rose opening their packages and having similar reactions; soft gasps and murmurs of admiration. Very carefully, Dave took the watch out of the box. The cool metal felt heavy in his hand. 

_“Dave, you have to do it,” Dirk’s voice was hoarse, his eyes wide behind his slipping sunglasses. A gash across his forehead, a savage blow from a crowbar, trickled blood down his face into his eyes and mouth, staining his teeth. The creature behind him, Lord Jack, glowed with a horrible energy, sparking and crackling audibly, as it held the crowbar across Dirk’s throat in a chokehold. Dirk had managed to get his katana up in time to keep the bar from crushing his windpipe, but his arms trembled violently with the effort it took to keep himself from being strangled. “You know it’s okay. I’ll be fine, you gotta—hrk—you have to do it, hurry!” As he spoke, the other creature, Spades Slick, came up behind them both and caught Lord Jack in an identical chokehold to the one it had on Dirk, with a large golden cane across its throat. Their hard carapaces made a horrific sound as metal clacked against them, and the beasts howled and struggled. Dirk grit his teeth and strained against the bar, trying to keep his footing in the scuffle. “Hurry!”_

_Dave’s hands shook. He felt his sword like a million-ton weight in his grip. Sweat and blood caked on his hands. He looked down at his blade, then back at his brother. He had had a hard time accepting that this was his Bro in the first place; while he knew that they were from different worlds and were different people, it had been hard to shake the instinct to compare him directly to the Bro that raised him. Dirk was a hard nut to crack; He was quiet and sullen and a little strange in a way Dave was all too familiar with. They had hardly had time to bond, and Dirk had already been so understanding, so apologetic. When their eyes met, Dave knew. His stomach twisted at the thought of what he had to do. Dirk had already taken the brunt of the damage in this battle and was seriously bloodied, no matter how hard they had tried to heal him._

_“I can’t!” Dave cried._

_“You have to!” Terezi screamed. The troll had been fighting one of the creatures before it turned on Dirk, and as she called out, teal blood spewed from her mouth. She spat out broken teeth. “Do it now or he’s dead for real!”_

_Dave knew. Without waiting for his brain to catch up, his body was moving. His blade slashed. He was so close, he could see the look in Dirk’s eyes as his head separated from his neck, his blood squirting across Dave’s face. The katana, supposedly unbreakable, was snapped in two and clattered to the ground. He saw the life go out of Dirk’s eyes. Dave’s momentum carried him on, slashing through the throats of both monsters as well. Their heads rolled. An intense burst of energy flared from Lord Jack, his body making a horrifying howling sound as his power began to boil and burst from his body. Dave kept going, flying past the carnage, and grabbed Terezi in his arms as he skidded to a halt. She slumped against him, exhausted._

_Time melted and slowed around Dave. He closed his eyes, felt it flow through him. When his eyes opened again he saw a copy of himself running toward Dirk, then another falling in step beside the first. One of them caught Dirk’s severed head like a football, the other caught his body as it went limp, twitching with residual nerve impulses. Reaching out his hand, Dave concentrated hard. He had to get them out of there before it all blew. Tears of exertion and rage poured down Dave’s face. He screamed wildly as he bent time around them with all his remaining energy, trying to support Terezi in his arms, and then, as it all blinked out of existence, he heard the explosion._

“Dave?”

He snapped out of his vision and looked up. Rose, across the table, was opening a dark wooden box lined with rich purple velvet. She looked dazed as she lifted a pair of knitting needles, etched with fine black patterning and painted her signature lilac color, out of the box. They looked less like a craft supply and more like deadly weapons, with their ridiculously sharpened tips. Jade had gotten up from her seat next to Dave and gone to hug John tightly around the neck, and though Dave couldn’t see her face or what her gift was, he could tell by John’s expression that they were both teary-eyed with joy. He made a mental note to ask her about it later. 

Dave looked up at John’s Dad, who was still standing at the table beside him. “Are you alright son?”

“I’m fine,” he replied, nodding, and hoping he looked convincing. “I love it, really. Thanks, Mr. Egbert.”

“You’re very welcome, though as John said, he helped pick it out. Are you sure you’re okay?” He looked genuinely concerned. 

“Fine, just tired still. It’s…It’s been a long day,” Dave replied. He looked back down at the watch and gingerly attached it to his wrist. It was a good weight; it felt right being there.

“Well, kids, it’s getting late,” Dad said to all his guests. He patted Dave’s shoulder and began collecting empty dishes. “John, you all go on upsptairs. Miss Lalonde, do you mind keeping me company while I clean this up?”

Rose’s mom smiled behind her martini. “Of course,” she replied. Rose scowled at her as her mother stood and followed him to the sink. 

“Let’s go,” John said. He and Jade had parted from their embrace. The four friends stood up. “There’s actually something I wanted to show you guys.”

Back in John’s bedroom, everyone had changed into pajamas for the evening. John was rummaging around in his closet, looking for something. Jade sat on the floor in front of Rose, who was braiding Jade’s mane of thick black curls into a neat plait with her swift fingers. Dave sat cross-legged in the center of the bed, looking at his watch. Something about watching the delicate gold hands tick around its face felt comforting. He could feel the ticking like a heartbeat, and timed his breaths with its rhythm. 

“I found it!” John exclaimed, tumbling backwards out of the mess that was piled in the closet. How his Dad continued to let him get away with the mess was a mystery. In his hands, John held a binder, the vinyl-covered three-ring type. Dave recognized it immediately; it was covered in stickers and drawings. John had kept all their letters and birthday cards over the years, from their first meeting online as preteens. It was an innocuous object, cute even, and nostalgic. However, something felt off. Dave felt the hair on the back of his neck prickle when he saw it, like there was an energy coming from it. 

Rose finished Jade’s hair and tied the braid off with an elastic band. Her hair was so long and now that even tied back, it hung to the floor when Jade sat. John crossed the room and sat on the floor next to Jade. Dave scooted to the edge of the mattress so that he could peer over John’s shoulder, though somehow, he knew what would be inside.

“I found this a little while ago, trying to clean out the closet,” John explained as he opened it up. Inside, clear plastic page protectors housed yellowing sheets of notebook paper and old greeting cards. Dave recognized Rose’s handwriting on the first page. John continued to flip through, showing off years of letters emblazoned with stickers and drawings. Jade squealed with delight at a letter she had written where she had doodled her squiddles. John pointed out a birthday card from Rose with an especially funny pun inside. There was one from Dave that John read aloud with the most embarrassing of his old raps written in it, and Dave cringed and hid his red face in his shirt as the girls and John cackled over it. 

When he turned to the last page, Dave was still hiding, but he heard Jade gasp and peeked out.

A ripped out page from Game Bro magazine. 

_**SBURB BETA COMING SOON** _

None of them spoke. They stared at the sheet of glossy paper. For some reason, the edges of the paper were burnt. A blob of a greasy black substance marred a good portion of the article, but the logo was there, clear as day: a green house, divided into four quadrants, with a smaller square cut out of the bottom inner corner of the upper right quadrant. 

Dave felt sick. His head throbbed with pain, and he groaned involuntarily, pressing hard on his eyes with his palms in an effort to make it stop. He saw flashes of random imagery in his head; a dead crow with two envelopes in its claws and a sword jammed through its chest, The apartment he shared with Bro, stretched and warped oddly with protrusions and additions built onto it, sitting on stilts in an ocean of lava, A view from his own point of view, looking down at himself in a green suit smeared with blood. He heard the ticking of the clock, impossibly loud in his ears.

“Dave? Jesus, are you okay?” 

Still woozy, Dave lifted his head from his hands. John had put a hand on his knee and dropped the binder on the floor, still open to the magazine article. Jade and Rose were both watching him, too, concern and confusion written on their faces. 

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I've been having these weird daydreams all day today. I'm starting to think they're...I dunno, flashbacks, I guess. Jesus, my therapist would have a field day with this.”

"About Sburb?" John asked.

“Should we really endeavor to talk about this now?” Rose interrupted. She sounded uncharacteristically upset. “We have had a very lengthy day already. Honestly, I do not see what is so necessary about putting undue pressure on us all to discuss this matter so soon. We have a week, and we only just arrived home, John. I do not plan to spend every day of my vacation as though under tight time constraints when we have so very little to go on in the first place.”

“But Rose, this is serious,” Jade tried to soothe her. She reached for Rose’s hand, but Rose yanked away and pressed her fingertips to her temples. Jade looked wounded. “We’re only together like this once in a while, right? Why not try and work it out while we can?”

“No. Not tonight. If this is how things are going to be with the three of you, then I am afraid I am going to have to excuse myself from this portion of the festivities and bid you all farewell for the evening. If you need me, kindly do your best not to. Now if you will excuse me, I am going for a walk around the lake.” Rose stood and headed for the door, shutting it quietly behind her so as to not wake the parents downstairs. The three remaining could hear her rush down the stairs and out the front door. John climbed onto the bed so he was level with Dave again, while Jade jumped up and ran to the window, watching Rose walk briskly towards the shore.

“She really went,” Jade said sadly, turning back to look at John and Dave. 

“What do we do now?” John asked.

Dave tried to hide a yawn behind his fist. Again, his limbs were starting to feel heavy, and his brain fogged. The nap he took earlier in the day had long since worn off. He glanced down at his new watch to see that it was a little after one in the morning. “We have to stay up till she comes back,” he said. 

“Agreed,” Jade seconded, though she also sounded exhausted. Dave’s yawn had clearly affected her, and she followed it up with one of her own. “What if something happens? Did she take her phone?”

John sighed. “You two need to go to bed. I’ll wait up for her.” Dave tried to protest, but John gave him an impatient look. “Honestly, Dave, you’re useless when you're this tired. Get some sleep. I’ll make sure she gets home okay. I’m sure she’ll be back any time now. 

“I’m staying up too!” Jade insisted.

Again, John sighed. “Jade, when she comes back to the house you’ll know, you’re sharing a room.” 

Jade scowled. Dave couldn’t help but marvel at how much she and John looked like each other when they made that face. Eventually, John relented. “Fine! Stay here. You two can have the bed till Rose comes back. I promise to wake you when she does.” She seemed placated by this. 

Jade and Dave crawled into bed side by side, and John switched the light off, but turned the lamp on his desk on. He took up his station by the window, sitting backwards in his old computer chair with his chin rested on his crossed arms. As soon as Jade’s head hit the pillow, she was snoring. Dave envied that about her. If nothing else, that girl could fall asleep anywhere. For a while, he watched her peaceful, snoring face, thinking that maybe it would help him relax himself. 

_“Dave! Oh no, oh no, are you okay? Please be okay!” Jade cried. Her voice was shrill with panic._

_Dave could hardly hear her. He was disoriented, and in intense pain. His eyes wouldn’t focus, but when he looked down, he could see red splattered on the snow. ‘Someone is bleeding a lot,’ he thought, trying to concentrate on opening his eyes. Jade sounded upset, and he had to help her._

_Suddenly, there she was above him. Her face was wet with tears, her eyes wide with shock. Dave felt himself losing consciousness, a deep ache growing in his chest even as his limbs went numb. He wanted to ask what happened, but he was confused, and his mouth no longer seemed to know how to form sounds. Jade’s warm tears dripped onto his face as she held him in her lap, trying to figure out what to do._

_“Please work, please work,” Jade chanted, and then she kissed him._

Dave blinked the memory away. It made him feel uneasy looking at her, and he rolled over to face John instead. He sat staring out the window, bathed in dramatic moonlight, watching the street below for any sign of Rose’s return. Almost inaudibly, he was humming a tune to himself. In minutes, Dave drifted into sleep, dreaming of soft snowfall and the croaking of frogs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guess who's baaaaack  
> it's only been a total of three days since i actively started working on editing this fic, which, to be frank, is a hodgepodge of scraps from 2013 mixed with fresh writing.  
> it is also five AM and i have no self control, so i am exhausted as i write this. if there are typos, please pretend you do not see them.  
> kisses!


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dave tries to clear his head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok....full disclosure, I just pulled the dialogue for the dream sequence for this chapter from the actual comic (roughly pages 7740-7760). It didn't really make sense to me to make this part up. Please don't roast me for plagiarism ok i am being honest up front!! Quite frankly i might do this here and there from here on out for things that require more accuracy, like actual memories, but the dreams will probably not always be 100% accurate to canon. I will do my best to cite where necessary. 
> 
> Also, I am a very novice HTML editor. I do not intend to use text colors as they appear in the comic, so. There's that.
> 
> EDIT: i am trying to play with html now. if it turns out ugly i am so sorry LMAO
> 
> Thanks for reading, and as always please leave kudos if you enjoy it!

When Dave woke, Jade was still curled up beside him in John's bed, snoring softly. The sun shone brightly through the open curtains, making him blink and squint uncomfortably against the glare as he sat up. John was gone, his chair still positioned by the window, and a note was on the seat in his place. With a yawn, Dave carefully got out of bed, doing his best not to wake Jade, and put his sunglasses on. He crossed the room to the chair and picked up the scrap of paper.

_**Rose came home. Don’t worry, she's fine. We are going for a drive. Back soon. -John** _

Dave looked out the window, and sure enough, John’s car was no longer parked in the driveway. In fact, the driveway was empty, and the house was silent. He checked his watch. Only eight a.m. With a sidelong glance at Jade, snoring louder now and sprawling out to eclipse what had been Dave’s side of the bed, he decided to take advantage of his time alone and clear his head. He quietly changed out of his pajamas into a pair of track pants and a hoodie, dug his sneakers and headphones out of the bottom of his suitcase, then scribbled a second note beneath John’s in case Jade woke up while he was gone. 

_**gone for a run. back soon** _

Then, for flavor, he doodled a Hella Jeff face.

The wind was brisk and cold on his face as Dave stepped outside. John’s neighborhood was always a reasonably quiet one, with rows of nearly identical houses in a grid around the vast lake. Some of the neighbors had begun putting up holiday decorations. One neighbor, an elderly woman with snow white hair pinned back in a matronly updo, was outside, checking her mail. Dave slipped on his shoes while standing on the stoop and did some quick stretches to warm up. With a small wave to the neighbor, who was watching him from her driveway, he was off.

Work and travel had disrupted his routine, and Dave realized he was beginning to get rusty. The first slope made his legs burn, his lungs strain. He pressed on, heading for the lake, where he knew there was a more secluded path to run on. Before long, he settled into the rhythm, his sneakers slapping on the pavement in quick succession. His music was loud enough that he couldn’t hear much around him, yet he felt more in tune with the world than usual. The trees thickened up ahead, and he turned onto the old asphalt trail around the shoreline. The sunlight gleamed off the water lapping at the lakeshore. Between the thick tree trunks and the undergrowth, Dave thought it almost looked red. 

As he rounded the first curve, Dave was deep in thought. Last night felt like a distant memory already, almost like he had imagined the confrontation with Rose. She never got that upset, or if she did, she was reluctant to show it. It was odd. And then, there was the matter of the dream that had followed…

Sweat dripped into his eyes as he rounded another curve in the trail, pushing himself to up the pace. The wind was icy as it whipped against his face, but his blood was pumping now, and he was more than warm enough. His heart thundered along with the bass in his ears. This dream was different from the rest. Usually, they were blurry, and it was hard to discern faces and other details. But after that call, and after his vision at the dinner table, Dave couldn’t get Dirk out of his mind. 

_Dirk._ The name had come to him on its own. More surprisingly, his face was so clear in Dave’s head, even when he was awake. Typically, the details got fuzzier with waking, but Dirk stayed, clear as day. He was near a mirror image of Dave, only with Bro’s spiky hairstyle and those obnoxious Kamina sunglasses. He had Dave’s freckles, his long nose, even the bump in the bridge was the same. They were the same height and build. Their teeth were even crooked in the same places. It was like they were clones of each other, like Dave’s reflection had stepped out of the mirror and fallen into step beside him. Yet, at the same time, he was the spitting image of Bro. Their eyes were the same unnatural tangerine color, and their voices were the same. Dave didn’t like to dwell on what that meant for his own appearance. He dreaded the day that he looked in the mirror and saw his older brother staring back at him. 

_The two Striders sat side-by-side on the rooftop of an ancient skyscraper. The sky was a wash of sickly green, billowing clouds of noxious gas roiling and blowing across the atmosphere. Lightning struck another skyscraper in the distance, lighting the eerie sky dramatically as thunder rumbled and shook the platform._

_“So, like…” Dirk trailed off, staring at the ground. He looked embarrassed. It was not an emotion Dave was used to seeing on his Bro’s face. “Things, between you and me, from your perspective, um…Are we like, not cool?”_

_Dave had no idea how to respond. He couldn’t make eye contact. Never in his life had he voiced the emotions he felt. He could only remember flashes of sparring matches with Bro, usually ending with the sole of a sneaker mashing Dave’s face into the rooftop, or a sword at his throat. Once, when he was about twelve, he had tripped Dave as the younger Strider was charging forward, sword at the ready, and Dave nearly impaled himself as he fell and rolled across the roof. He had thought about that increasingly since the day he found his brother’s corpse, run through with his own blade._

_“Well?” Dirk prompted._

_Dave sighed. “Well, here’s well I guess. I didn’t fucking like you that much, okay?” he felt the anger rise in his throat, perhaps inappropriately directed at this version of his brother. There was so much bad blood, so many awful memories. How many nights had Dave sat up at home, so hungry he couldn’t sleep because the refrigerator didn’t have any food in it? How many times had his brother quite literally stomped him into the dirt in an effort to “toughen him up” and pretended that was good parenting?_

_“Oh,” Dirk said quietly. Dave glanced at him. He looked utterly crestfallen, and sat quietly for a moment, chewing the inside of his cheek as he processed. “Why not?”_

_“Honestly, I don’t know if I want to get into it,” Dave replied sharply, leaning back on his palms, and looking at the boiling sky._

_“Okay,” Dirk agreed. Several minutes passed, and they both stared at the scenery. The air was thick enough already, and the awkwardness made it even harder to breathe. A fat, neon green cloud skidded by, so close Dave thought he could almost reach out and touch it. He wondered if it would be as toxic as it looked._

_How nice would it be to actually have a brotherly connection? How nice would it feel to get all that hurt out in the open and start to heal? That was Bro, sitting next to him, biologically, but they were a world away from each other. Already this kid had shown more emotion than Dave’s version ever had. How deep did the similarities go?_

In the present, Dave slowed to a jog, then a walk. His heart was pounding, his muscles strained and weakening. Up ahead was a little wooden bridge crossing a creek. He walked to the center of it and stopped, hands on his hips as he caught his breath. The water flowed by, bubbling over rocks and driftwood. He leaned against the railing and watched the water babble by. In the summer, he knew, this place would be teeming with life. In the winter, though, it was eerily bleak and empty. The snow couldn’t fall as thickly here through the treetops, but a dusting coated the railing of the bridge and the boards of its floor. He and John often walked this trail in the summer, veering off the path into the undergrowth to search for forage items or weird stuff for Dave’s dead stuff collection.

_“Okay actually, maybe I will get into it.”_

He took off again, climbing the steady incline that marked the halfway point of the trail. Around this curve, Dave knew, he would be in the home stretch, but he wasn’t ready to go home just yet. As he topped the hill, he made an impulsive decision; there was a secondary path, less level, a little more dangerous, that forked off just ahead. He headed that direction, checking his watch. It was only 8:30. Surely John and the others could keep themselves occupied without him another hour or so. Navigating around protruding roots and wash boarded dirt, Dave sprinted through the woods, feeling the cold air fill him with a rush of adrenaline he had been craving. 

_“I dunno why my friends got to have adults around who cared about them. They complained bitterly about stuff, so I guess I convinced myself they were all in the same boat as me, but that’s not how it was.”_

The woods grew thicker as Dave’s legs carried him forward. Up ahead, a fallen tree blocked the path. Without a second thought he vaulted over it, and kept running, only increasing in pace as the trail dipped lower. He wanted to outrun the memory, but it kept coming.

_“The only feeling left is this insane impression that I was raised by someone who fuckin’ hated me.”_

Dave was so wrapped up in his thoughts that he didn’t see the rock jutting up from the path until he had tripped over it. “Fuck!” he shouted, hitting the ground hard and skidding across the dirt. The rocky ground shredded the knees of his pants and the palms of his hands as he tried to break his fall. Trying to spare his joints some damage, he tucked and rolled, the downward incline of the path carrying him much farther than he had estimated he would go. His momentum slammed him into a tree stump, knocking the wind out of him, and he lay there, dazed, staring up at what little he could see of the sky through the canopy.

_“What…did he do?”_

Dirk’s question repeated in his head, over and over. What did he do? What didn’t he do? Dave remembered countless split lips, countless bruises. He remembered the day he learned that it was not normal to homeschool yourself, without any parental supervision. He remembered all the times he brushed off neglectfulness as Bro just being “cool” and “aloof.” He remembered all the weird porn setups, the webcams. How the fuck had no one seen what was going on in that apartment? He had been so alone. Until John came along, and his world opened up.

Somewhere up the trail, Dave had lost his headphones. His phone had fallen out of his pocket too but was within arm’s reach. He rolled onto his stomach and tried to sit up, soon discovering how badly his hands and wrists hurt from the impact. The stump he had crashed into supported his back, and he began to assess the damage. His knees were coated in dust and oozing blood, likewise with his dirty palms. The ankle of the foot that had made contact with the rock had definitely twisted, possibly sprained. Gingerly, Dave pulled up the elastic cuff of his joggers, and prodded gently at the swelling joint. Not broken, but fucking painful, nonetheless. He winced and dreaded getting to his feet. Maybe it would be best to sit there a while. He leaned back against the stump and tried to take deep breaths, though he felt like he had been donkey kicked in the ribcage as well.

_“I don’t remember the atmosphere ever not being nerve wracking,” Dave continued, his emotions mounting the more he talked about it. “All havin’ to sneak around and…Ugh, my shitty childhood spider senses are tingling just thinking about it. It was ‘training,’ you know? But you know what it really was it was some vicious shit that was bad and sucked and I fucking hated it. It didn’t make me stronger. It did the opposite. It made me never want to fight, it made me never want to see blood or be near danger or hear metal sounds. It made me hate the idea of being a hero, because he was a hero and he ruined the idea of heroism.”_

_Dave could feel Dirk watching him now, in silence. He seemed awed by every word, like he couldn’t believe a person could do something like that. That HE would do something like that, though they both knew he was not the offender. Dave ranted and rambled, spilling his guts of all the anxieties and fears that his brother had instilled in him so young. He bitched about the puppets, and about Lil’ Cal, whose face he still saw in his nightmares. That gold-toothed grin, those wide, all-seeing blue eyes. The thought made him want to vomit. Eventually, he deflated. “I dunno if I figured something out here, like, um, ‘explained’ something, or...if I’m just driving myself crazy with this talk and nothing even needs explaining. It doesn’t change my past or how I feel about him. He was still pretty much awful no matter what the reason, and I’m sure that’s the only feeling I’ll ever have about him. So, who cares why it was like that.”_

_“Yeah…” Dirk replied quietly._

The anger and sadness pushed Dave to his feet, both in the dream world and in the waking. It was much more of a struggle for him in reality, and he swore and groaned as he tried to put weight on his injured leg. Thinking quickly, Dave grabbed a fallen branch that seemed strong enough to act as a walking stick. He held it in one hand and leaned on the trees alongside the path for additional support. Slowly, he made his way back toward the main path, hissing with pain with every step. The sooner he got the hell out of there, the better.

_Dream Dave had walked to the edge of the platform and was staring off the edge. He felt raw, like someone had scrubbed his body and his brain with a Brillo pad. He had thought that getting this off his chest would feel better. He could feel Dirk standing behind him, watching uneasily, trying to find words to respond._

_“That…” Dirk began, then paused again. “All that sounds really bad. I don’t know what to say though.”_

_Dave didn’t reply, instead just sitting down on the very edge of the building and dangling his legs out into open air. Dirk continued anyway. “Maybe I shouldn’t say anything. Since I just remind you so much of him for, uh. Obvious reasons.” He crossed his arms over his chest, staring at the ground. Dave did not turn around. He contemplated just leaping off the side of the building, letting himself freefall till the last possible second, and just flying away until it was time to go into battle again. That would have been better than this, right? “I don’t want to make you feel worse, or make it sound like I’m offering a defense. For him or for me. Because I don’t have one for either of us," Dirk continued. He sounded genuinely sorry._

The sight of the pocked asphalt of the lakeshore trail was a sight for, quite literally, sore eyes. Dave cursed himself for his decision to take the scenic route as he limped out onto the path and headed for home. He was thankful that the cold wind blowing across the water had kept the usual foot traffic at bay this morning, because he knew he was a sight to behold: leaves in his hair, a now busted pair of headphones hanging uselessly around his neck (when he had found them, he was disappointed to discover that his momentum had ripped the cord in half), hobbling along on a broken branch cane like some kind of fucked up nature wizard. His return to the paved section of trail was a signifier of his return to civilization, and he knew he only had to make it about a mile back to John’s house. Every step was awful, but he grit his teeth and dealt with it. 

_Dave sighed, and turned to face his brother, who had sat down beside him on the ledge. Dirk looked guilty, like a dog that just stole food off its owner’s plate. “Come on, man,” Dave said. “YOU didn’t do anything. This was just…some douchebag with your exact DNA, who happened to grow up to be my Bro. You had a completely different life, full of like…different choices and actions and stuff. And even if you were gonna turn out like him, you’ve barely cleared the halfway mark on actually chronologically gettin’ there. In some way ranting about all this is probably just uncool of me, because…” Dave trailed off. The two of them shared a long, searching look, inspecting each other, scrutinizing. “You aren’t him.”_

As the adrenaline continued to wear off, Dave could feel the pain in his ankle intensify. It throbbed and shot fingers of red-hot pain up his shin with each step. Huffing and panting, he stumbled out of the forest and onto the sidewalk, back in the suburban jungle that John called home. Just a couple blocks now. He could manage. 

_“In any case, I’m sure I was completely in the wrong, and I’m sorry I messed up your life.”_

As John’s house came back into view, Dave was relieved to see Mr. Egbert’s car was still gone from the driveway. John’s was parked on the street, and Dave could faintly see movement through the kitchen window. He looked down at his watch, and his heart sank. The face was cracked, and he swore. He hadn’t even made it twenty-four hours with the damn thing before he busted it. It seemed to still function, however, as the hands read 9:45. It had felt like an eternity walking home, but it had only really been a bit over an hour. 

As he limped up the driveway, John looked up at him through the glass, and his grin melted into a look of shock. He dropped whatever he was doing and disappeared from the window, only to burst through the front door and run down the driveway. “Dude!” John exclaimed. “Holy shit! Are you alright?”

Dave opened his mouth to speak at the exact second that his walking stick finally gave out and snapped. He stumbled and lurched forward. John lunged and caught him, hauling him upright and letting Dave lean on his shoulder. His whole leg was on fire, now, and Dave gladly leaned into John’s support. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed the same neighbor from this morning gawking at them from her driveway. “Busybody,” Dave mumbled to himself as John helped him into the house.

The Egbert home smelled like frying bacon and pancakes. John hobbled Dave into the living room, where Rose was lounging on the sofa with a book in her hand and Jade’s head resting in her lap, the latter girl scrolling on her phone. Both looked up as John entered and leapt to their feet. 

“Dave!” Jade shouted, rushing over to lend a hand. Rose had already disappeared upstairs to retrieve the first aid kit from the bathroom. “What happened?”

John sat him down on the couch, kneeling in the floor in front of him. “Can you get your shoes off on your own?”

“Of course I can, I’m not fuckin’ useless,” Dave scoffed, bending over to do so. He immediately regretted that decision, as his bruised ribs screamed in protest. He hissed and leaned back again. “Never mind. Mind the left one, it’s pretty fucked up.”

John rolled his eyes and set about untying Dave’s left sneaker. He tried his best to be careful pulling it off as Rose appeared again, an ice pack wrapped in a kitchen towel in one hand and the first aid supplies in the other. John pushed the leg of Dave’s pants up and removed the sock. Dave winced at the sight of his ankle; it was turning a gross purple color and had doubled in size. 

“I tripped,” Dave explained simply through grit teeth as John pressed the ice pack to his swollen flesh. It hurt, but the cold quickly began to feel refreshing.

“Do you think it’s broken? Maybe we should go to the hospital,” Jade asked. She had taken it upon herself to begin setting up the first aid supplies and laying out the necessary ones on the couch beside her. She tore open an alcohol wipe and gestured for Dave to give her his hands. He obliged.

“I don’t think so, it just looks like shit,” he replied, sucking in a breath and holding it as the alcohol stung the cuts on his hands. “Guys, I’m fine, really, c’mon.”

“You should have told us where you were going,” Rose chided. She had that stern look on her face that Dave knew was a mask for her concern. He rolled his eyes.

“Oh, that’s rich, miss ‘I’m going for a walk around the lake alone after midnight,’” he taunted. Rose narrowed her eyes at him and turned back to the kitchen. It smelled like John had forgotten to take something off the burner.

“She’s just worried about you, asshole,” John scolded. He had set the ice pack aside and began wrapping Dave’s ankle with a compression bandage. “And she’s right, you should have told us where you were going.”

“It was spur of the moment,” Dave replied. The compression felt incredible, and he sighed with relief, letting his head loll back on the couch. Suddenly, he was exhausted, and starving. Even burnt bacon smelled delicious. “Sorry.”

John and Jade were quiet as they worked on bandaging him up. His knees were skinned raw, and there were tiny pebbles stuck in the flesh that John had to pull out with tweezers. Jade let Dave squeeze her hand as he did so, the sight of the tiny stones covered in his blood making him woozy. When they were finally finished Jade helped Dave sit back and prop his injured ankle on the throw pillows, then sat on the floor beside him. Rose returned with a plate heaped with breakfast food and a glass of water. Dave gratefully accepted and tore into both with vigor, clearing his plate and draining the glass in minutes. 

The silence in the room was thick, no one wanting to breach the topic of last night. When everyone was finished eating, Rose collected the plates despite everyone’s protests, and busied herself with washing them. Dave knew that she was still avoiding them for sure, then. Rose Lalonde was not a fan of washing dishes, that was a fact he was quite sure of.

“Where’s your Dad?” Dave asked John, who was sitting in an armchair beside the fireplace. He had been staring off into space, clearly not in the present moment. He snapped to attention at Dave’s voice, and shrugged.

“Miss Lalonde was only in town for the night,” John explained. “I guess they went somewhere before she had to catch her flight back home tonight. We have the house to ourselves for today, if I had to guess.”

Dave nodded, thinking it was a little sad that Miss Lalonde had gone already. Today was the fourth, and Rose’s official birthday. They usually lumped hers, his, and Jade’s together, since they were all in the same week, but it seemed a little rude for Rose’s mom to dip out on the official day. Maybe that was what Rose had wanted, though. “Where did you and Rose go this morning?” Dave asked.

Almost as if summoned, Rose returned, wiping her hands on a towel. “We were visiting the local library.”

Dave raised an eyebrow. “The library?”

Rose and John exchanged a look. “Well, I requested that John escort me on a research mission,” Rose began, crossing her arms over her chest. “And…I suppose that I am ready to discuss matters of our collective past, now. That is, if the three of you are prepared to delve into it as well.”

The tension in the room had reached its peak. Dave felt his scalp prickle with anticipation. This was it. This was what he had been waiting for for months now. He took a deep breath. 

“I’m as ready as I’m ever gonna be, I reckon,” he replied, sitting up from his reclined position despite Jade’s protests and insistence that he keep his leg elevated. “Where should we start?”

Rose crossed the room to where her computer bag hung on a hook in the entry way. She produced a manila folder from one of the pockets, which she handed to Dave. In purple felt-tipped pen, Rose had written the dreaded word, and a date: **SBURB, April 13, 2009**.

“We have a lot to cover, so get comfortable,” John said. “And…Whatever happens, remember we’re in this together.”

Dave opened the folder and began to read.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Beta kids get to work digging into their pasts, and find a little more than they bargained for.

The first few pages of documents in the folder were photocopied from newspapers and magazines the library had in its archives, each one detailing SBURB, the upcoming anticipated Game of the Year of 2009, so they all claimed. Dave skimmed through them, feeling a sense of familiarity grow in the back of his mind with every word. Jade read wordlessly over his shoulder, having moved at some point to sit beside him so that she could better see the contents of the folder.

The fourth page caused Dave to gasp and drop the folder on the floor. The pages scattered across the carpet. 

It was a missing poster. With his own face on it. 

“John,” he spoke calmly as possible, though his voice trembled. “Rose, what the fuck is that.”

“I know it’s a lot, Dave, but really, we’ve just—”

“I’m not fucking missing, what is that?” he snapped, pointing accusingly at the flyer. As his brain caught up to his body, Dave realized there were two more posters: one of Rose, and one of John. Theirs bore their school pictures and claims of a reward for their safe return. His heartbeat drowned out whatever John was saying to him. Jade, of course, didn’t have one, because of her…unique living situation, of which he had a hard time remembering all the details now. But the sight of his own…how had that happened? Bro likely wouldn’t have noticed his absence, and he damn sure had never taken a photograph of Dave. The only photos Dave could remember ever seeing of himself at that age were taken by himself in the dirty bathroom mirror and developed in his ramshackle darkroom. He had never set foot in a brick and mortar school as long as he could remember, and knew there was never much legal documentation of his existence before the age of fourteen or so. He had discovered when attempting to get his driver’s license that he didn’t even have a social security number. His ears rang as he racked his brain, trying to think. He would remember something like this, wouldn't he? Maybe he'd hit his head in that fall and gotten concussed. Maybe that's what was happening. 

“Dave, dude, stay with us.” John’s voice finally got through, and Dave looked up, dazedly. Rose had gathered the papers back up in their proper order, and handed the folder to Jade. She was holding the poster out to Dave, a grim look on her face. 

He took the sheet of paper and read it. 

“ **Missing:** David Strider  
**Age:** 13 years **Height:** 5 feet 4 inches  
**Weight:** 80 pounds **Hair:** Blonde **Eyes:** Red

**Last seen on April 13th, 2009. Wearing a white t-shirt with a vinyl record design, jeans, and red sneakers. Aviator sunglasses. Lives in the Houston Metropolitan Area. If you have any information, please call this number** ,” He didn’t recognize the number printed on the flyer, and assumed it was one of Bro’s burner phones. 

“What does this mean?” he asked, still staring at the photo of his thirteen year old self. Even in this photo, with his glasses on, a bruise was visible under the lenses. Something about it all felt wrong, but as was becoming increasingly common, Dave couldn’t figure out why. Maybe it was his certainty that what he was looking at didn’t exist.

“As you all know, we each had an experience around John’s thirteenth birthday that we…can’t quite recall,” Rose began. “I realize I have not been the most forthcoming about my personal endeavors around that time. We have never discussed it in detail. I feel that now is the time to clear the air, so to speak, and present some theories.”

Dave didn’t know what to say. Beside him, Jade was still thumbing through the documents. She stopped on one, and touched it gingerly with her fingertips. “This is about the meteors.”

Rose nodded. Dave looked over at the paper in Jade’s hand. It was a photocopy of an article from about a week before John’s birthday, documenting a massive meteor that had made landfall on the outskirts of Seattle. The article claimed that a few thousand people were injured, dead, or missing. Hundreds of houses were leveled or condemned by the blast. The next page was similar, but, to Dave’s shock, there was the Houston skyline. His stomach sank at the sight of it. Another meteor, larger than the Seattle strike, had leveled an entire neighborhood not far from his apartment. There were photos of the carnage, storefronts Dave was familiar with in flames or boarded up. A row of body bags, lining the crater, were pictured at the top of the page. The next page was another ad for Sburb, with that familiar green house logo. Dave recognized this one as the same page John kept in his binder, but cleaner.

“John and I began a session of this game together,” Rose began, perching herself on the arm of the chair John was slumped in. Both of them looked exhausted. He was staring into the middle distance, lost in thought. “On his thirteenth birthday. I…remember helping him set up the introductory equipment. It was a very high-tech world building game, allowing a player to manipulate their co-player’s environment in a very real sense. It started out normally enough, and then…”

“And then the timer started,” John spoke up, still staring into space. “And the meteor came.”

Dave’s head throbbed hard, vision in one of his eyes going out completely for a second. He sucked in a ragged breath and cradled his head in his hands, trying to make the pain stop. His eye felt like it might burst. Flashes of imagery came to him, faces he almost recognized swam together, blending and blurring in pixelation and static.

“It blew up my whole neighborhood,” John went on, like he didn’t see anything around him anymore. In his head, he was far away, reliving what happened back then. “It destroyed everything. Well, everything but…my house. And Me. We ended up somewhere else. I got transported away at the last second, right as one of the meteors was coming for my house.”

“We all ended up playing together,” Rose continued. Jade flipped to the next page, to a photo of Rose’s mother’s estate on the east coast. It was surrounded by burning trees, dangerously close to the house itself. “We all ended up in The Medium together.”

In his mind, Dave saw his apartment again, delicately positioned on top of a stilt system of iron I-beams. The sky was black, and all around, lava bubbled and boiled. He could feel the heat on his face, feel the sweat beading on his brow. 

“Things got out of hand. We had no frame of reference for what we were doing, really, and how could we? It was unprecedented,” Rose sighed. “and we were kids.”

“I was alone out there,” Jade said, almost to herself. “It all feels like a dream.”

“You were asleep for a good bit of it,” John replied. “It was a close call. We almost lost you.”

Dave looked up at Jade. She was worrying her bottom lip between her teeth as she stared intently at the article in her hands, reading. He remembered the urgency, trying to get each other to safety while Jade was in and out of consciousness. He remembered the fire burning ever closer to Rose’s house, teasingly asking her if "your house is burning down yet or what" to keep the panic of reality from sinking in. Slowly, it was all coming back. The question was, how had they gotten out? How had they gotten back to Earth as they knew it? Something else was tugging at the edge of his thoughts, too. He closed his eyes, and tried to focus on the image of Karkat, but his face was still blurry and warped. The effort made Dave’s headache worse. He shook it off. If this was real, and things had gone mostly the way they remembered, what did all this documentation even mean? What value did it hold? Sure, it was bizarre, but did it do anything other than shake their already tenuous grip on reality?

Jade turned to the last page in the folder. It was a hand-drawn diagram, in both Rose and John’s handwriting, on a sheet of copy paper. It looked like a drawing of the solar system, but the planets were different, and there were less of them than you would see in an Earth science textbook. Words like “inciphisphere” and “the furthest ring” were scrawled messily, as if remembered in haste and written before they could be forgotten again. A planet with a small satellite orbiting it caught Dave’s eye, and he rested his fingers on it. It was labelled “Derse.”

_“We lost. Can’t finish the game with a dead Heir and Witch.”_

Dave looked up at Rose, who was already watching him with a knowing, wounded look in her violet eyes. They were the color of the dark planet itself. 

“As I implied before, I have…a theory,” Rose began. Her hands were folded in her lap, and she was trying to disguise the fact that she was fidgeting. “Based on this information, and our dreams, and various other factors that I have been analyzing and considering these past few months. It is just a theory, but I feel there could be some validity to it.”

_“After you go, what do you think will happen to me? Will I just cease to exist?”_

_“I don’t know. I mean, your whole timeline will. Maybe.”_

_“Maybe? Is there a chance it’ll continue to exist, and I’ll just be here alone forever? I’m not sure which outcome is more unsettling.”_

“I think that when we…when we beat the game,” Rose said, sounding uncertain. “Maybe there was a glitch, or an error, or maybe just the game messing with us. We were supposed to win, but what if the universe wanted to deal us one last blow? To try and stop us, as a last ditch effort?”

“What does that mean, Rose?” Jade asked. “Messing with us how?”

Rose and John exchanged a look, and John nodded. Rose sighed. “Based on the amount of twists and turns and failed timelines we experienced, I think it is entirely possible that some force, maybe the game itself, maybe whatever foe we were working together against, maybe something we have no recollection of or any way to understand…is still affecting us. Now. In this timeline.”

Dave felt something click in his head at the mention of failed timelines. He gazed down at his watch, with its freshly cracked face. 

_“The thing with time travel is you can’t overthink it. Just roll with it and see what happens.”_

“What I am suggesting here, I suppose, is that we never left. We are still inside. And it does not want us to leave. It is giving us enough snippets to keep us on our toes, but otherwise placates us. Keeps our curiosity at bay. The dreams may be our subconscious minds trying to wake us up, remind us we still need to be in flight or fight. We are under its spell, and we must break free,” Rose finished.

"What about these, though?" Dave asked, waving the poster again. "What does this have to do with anything?"

"It seems to me they are meant to give us a false lead to chase."

"I'm not following, Lalonde."

She sighed, and massaged her temple with her fingertips. "I must admit, it is confusing. I can't make much sense of it myself. The only explanation I can come up with is that it is but another fabrication in a series of fabrications. The game knows we want answers, that we have gaps in our memories that we will want filled. These...well. I believe they are meant to be reassurance that, even if we were gone, we came back to a world that missed us. That after the game, our home was still waiting for us, when in fact we are learning that the opposite was true."

“But we won, didn’t we?” Jade asked, brow furrowed. She was still staring intently at the diagram, at another one of the planets, the one labelled Prospit. 

“How would we know if we didn’t?” Rose countered. 

In his mind, Dave was far away, standing in front of a red door, its knob a glowing crystal ball with a spirograph spinning slowly in the center. The knob turned, and blinding, searing white light poured out as it opened, obscuring everything. Swallowing the world whole.

_**LOADING, PLEASE WAIT** _

No one spoke. It was just a hunch, sure, but what if she was right? What other explanation was there? The four of them sat together in silence, pondering. Thinking back, there were little clues, little signs that there was something off. John had always said his Dad seemed different after the incident. No one could give any real, concrete details, but there were some discrepancies. Thinking hard, Dave began to realize that other things didn’t add up, or seemed odd. He thought about that neighbor across the street this morning, staring blankly. Was she even real? Or some sort of NPC? Moreover, Dave couldn’t get the image from his dream out of his head: going through the door on the victory platform. The looming Sburb house. The empty room, the warped memory of Karkat. Suddenly, he was unsure of so many things in his life. Why could he not remember anything clearly before that dream, suddenly? Things were blurring now, warping and changing, like when you wake from a dream and begin to lose details of it the more awake you become. How long had he and John been living together? Was any of it real? Even these news articles, the missing posters. Were they just strategically placed clues, minor details to deter them from the truth? To reassure them that there wasn’t a monster under the bed, waiting to devour them whole?

“It’s just another room in the same house,” Dave said.

“If that’s the case…” John spoke up finally, with that far away look in his eye. “What do we do now?”

“We find the door,” Dave replied. “The real one. And we get out for good.”

****

_When Dave opened his eyes, he was in the empty room again._

__

_**LOADING, PLEASE WAIT** _

__

The message glowed on the wall across from where Dave stood. He could hear his heartbeat, uncomfortably overpowering in his ears. The entire space was so brightly lit that there were no shadows, and the air hummed like a billion fluorescent tube lights. Dave glanced around, trying to remember how to move the rest of his body. Slowly, he was able to move his fingers, hands, then his arms, then take a step. There was a lag to every movement, like he was swimming in Jell-O, but eventually, he was able to reach the wall with the glowing message on it. He touched his fingertips to the flat surface and felt its energy buzz through him. 

__

When he turned around, he gasped at what he saw. 

__

Karkat Vantas was standing in the center of the room, where Dave had been standing himself only seconds before. He appeared to be frozen in place, mid-step, one arm outstretched like he was reaching for something. Just as he had been at the end of Dave’s dream. For a long moment, Dave just stared at the troll, his heart beating hard against his ribs. Would he regain mobility too? Would Dave be able to talk to him? What would he say? But nothing happened. He was like an incredibly realistic wax figure, frozen in time. 

__

“Karkat?” He spoke the name uncertainly, and quickly realized it felt at home in his mouth. Karkat. Dave took a step forward, whispering the name over and over under his breath. Whether he was trying not to forget it, or trying his to wake the troll, he wasn’t sure. Maybe both. Cautiously, Dave approached him, stepping closer until they were only a foot apart. Karkat’s mouth was open slightly, revealing a row of incredibly sharp looking fangs. His skin was a warm-toned grey, and his hands had sharp claws on each fingertip. Gingerly, Dave reached out his own hand and touched Karkat’s where it grasped at empty space. He was shocked to find that he was warm, like a real body, and he too buzzed with energy. Dave felt a rush of emotions, but was too confused to decipher them. He continued examining the troll. He was stocky, with angular, harsh facial features. Every inch of skin save for his hands and face were covered by a thick black turtleneck with the zodiac sign for Cancer on it in grey. His hair was a mass of thick, coarse black curls and a set of blunt horns the colors of candy corn protruded from the top of his head. His eyebrows were thick and dark, raised in surprise. Dave reached out a curious hand and touched those too, very delicately, like he was afraid to wake him. His eyes were just like Dave remembered them; yellow where the whites of a human’s would be, and a luminous red orange in the iris. Dave walked a slow circle around him, taking him in. He wanted to remember this time. He felt a deep longing in his stomach, a sort of sad sick feeling, at the thought of forgetting him again. 

__

As he circled around and faced Karkat again, Dave saw that tears had begun to roll silently down the troll’s cheeks.

****

Dave woke again in John’s bed, and he couldn’t remember how he had gotten there. 

He looked around blearily, and discovered that night had fallen. The room was dark, and subtle moonlight glowed in through the window. Dave sat up and looked at his watch. 12:43 AM. The others were gone, leaving Dave all alone in John’s childhood bedroom. For a moment, he forgot about the earlier incident, and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. He saw the Ace bandage wrapped around his swollen ankle and grimaced. Gingerly he touched his toes to the floor, and tried to put weight on the foot. The joint throbbed in protest, but he was able to stand. That was a good sign, but he knew he had to be careful. Slowly he began hobbling for the door, but as he reached for the knob, it opened. John was standing on the other side.

“I heard you get up,” he said, slipping into the room and shutting the door quietly behind himself. “You shouldn’t be standing on that ankle, Dave. It’ll need some TLC if it’s going to heal. Get back in bed.”

Dave didn’t object to John’s offer of his arm, and John helped him get back into bed. Egbert looked utterly exhausted. There were dark bags under his eyes, and the usual gleam of mischief had gone out of them. Dave’s heart ached.

“How long was I out?” Dave asked. “I don’t remember falling asleep.”

“You dozed off on the couch,” John said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Well. Passed out is more like it. One second we were talking, the next you were snoring. Guess that fall this morning took a lot out of you,” He yawned, covering his mouth with his hand.

“Are the girls ok?”

John nodded. “They finally fell asleep. I felt bad leaving them alone with Rose so antsy. She seems to feel like she has to figure this out all on her own.”

Dave nodded. That sounded like Rose. She was brilliant and logical to a fault sometimes. “What about your dad?”

John was quiet for a moment too long. Dave’s stomach sank. 

“He didn’t come home,” he finally said, quietly. “I…I’m taking it as confirmation that the game knows we’re aware of it. I’m beginning to think that he was just…” he trailed off, staring at the floor.

A construct of the game, an illusion to keep them preoccupied. Placated. He had probably dissolved into nothingness as John and Rose were unraveling the mystery at the library that morning. Dave didn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry.”

John shrugged and laid back on the bed, staring at the ceiling. “I’m not as sad as I thought I would be,” he said. “I…I think I always knew it wasn’t really him. But he was a nice placeholder.”

The thought of it made Dave sick. He rolled on his side, facing John. John did the same. They lay there for a long time, nearly nose to nose, just watching each other in silence. Eventually, Dave was the one to break.

“I had another dream.”

John raised an eyebrow. “I take it you want to talk about this one.”

Dave nodded. “When…When everything ended. When we went through that door, the one on the victory platform. What did you see?”

John pondered that a moment. “I saw…a white room. And some words on the wall. A loading message.”

Okay, so they were on the same page. “I saw that too. I guess we all did. Did you see anyone in there with you?”

John frowned. “No. It was just me. It was…really lonely. I felt like I was in there for so long.”

Dave thought about the weird, flowing matter he saw in his dream. It all felt so long ago. Was that part even real? Now he wasn’t sure about anything. He continued, “I dreamed I was back there. I was alone at first, but then when I turned around, Karkat was there.”

John didn’t say anything for a long time. He wouldn’t meet Dave's gaze, either, which was…rare, especially now that they had built up enough trust that Dave often went bare-faced around him, his wide red eyes right there for the scrutinizing. Often, he had told Dave that his father always instilled in him to make eye contact with people when you were having a conversation, and it was a bit of an adjustment for them both. Dave often felt himself withering under John’s gaze, his eyes just a little too blue, for the first couple of years they lived in close proximity. Eventually, Dave had softened up, and John had been thrilled, though he would never say it out loud. He didn’t have to; with all that eye contact, he could see it in John’s face. It was overwhelming, sometimes, how much of an open book he was, how trusting. 

Not tonight, though. He looked worn, and sad in a way that Dave didn’t understand. How many times, now, from his perspective, had he lost his Dad? It was so different from losing Bro, which Dave could remember in such clarity now. His face had been so peaceful, so slack; Dave never saw him like that. Blood trickled from the corners of Bro’s mouth, crusted at the edges. His guts had been run through by his own sword, stained from tip to hilt with so much blood, more blood than Dave thought lived inside a person. His hat had fallen off his head, and lay a few feet away. Dave saw more of his own brother's face that day than he had in the thirteen years he had lived to that point. It had hurt, sure, and he had been so young and confused, but over the years, it sank in that his childhood with Bro was not normal in any capacity. How could he ever relate to John, who loved his father so much? Who felt he had taken him for granted?

Dave kept talking. “I couldn’t remember him for a long time,” he went on, pushing the image of Bro’s mangled guts out of his mind. Karkat came back, frozen in space, arm reaching out. ‘Was he reaching for me?’ Dave wondered. Now, he could almost remember the fleeting touch of that too-warm hand. “I would dream about him, but his face would be erased by the next morning. I still, like, even now, I can’t remember who he…who he was to me. But I remember his face, and now I’m even more confused. If I remember so much, why is he such a dark spot on my brain? Does the game want me to forget him for some reason or did I push him out of my--”

John was looking directly at him again when Dave looked up. His eyes, still so tired, so sad, were analyzing Dave’s face. One of his hands reached out and, large though it was, it was so gentle stroking Dave’s cheek. Dave couldn’t help it, he melted into it. Everything was so twisted, so convoluted and confusing now. He thought things had been normal again, thought that he was on the up and up. Finding out that it was all a trick, an illusion, a hood over his eyes, was not doing good things for his anxiety. He thought about his therapist, sitting in her cozy, yet clinical office, and pouring out his heart to her. She wasn’t real. He could remember the art she had on her walls, the name of the university on her degrees, framed behind her wall, and yet…’And yet you can’t remember Karkat’s voice.’

John stopped that train of thought with his touch, his fingers gently stroking a shock of white hair back behind Dave’s ear. They lay there together in the dark for a beat, two, and then John spoke up.

“What if we find him again? What will you do?”

The question sank from Dave’s ears to the pit of his gut. John spoke like he knew something he wasn’t letting on, like he was holding back. Dave realized then that he knew the truth. The full truth. And something wasn’t coming out.

“What are you talking about?” Dave asked, voice uncertain. 

John was still staring at him, right in the eyes. Dave felt so naked, laid bare without his glasses to protect him. To shield and deflect, just like he was taught. To block, to parry. He couldn't do that now, and John's gaze was so intense it hurt.

“If you have him back again…will what we’ve built together go away?”

Dave didn’t know what to say. His mouth opened, closed. His lips pressed into a tight line, the default state of the Strider expression. John laughed at him. “It’s not that big of a deal,” he said, though he didn’t move his hand. “I…I never realized, I guess, that I needed you so much. It’s like the universe put us together on purpose, don’t you think? We could never have survived this long without each other,” his eyes looked so sad. Dave’s heart broke just looking at him, yet he didn’t know what to say. How many times in their lives had John denied having any attraction to him? How many times had he insisted to Dave that he wasn’t gay, didn’t like that sort of label, as if any of those words meant anything when what was real was the feeling itself? What was John trying to convey to him? “Maybe…maybe I was oblivious. Maybe I took it for granted. Maybe that wasn’t up to me, I guess. This is all so confusing, this game mess, it’s too much, and—” John was getting choked up, Dave could hear the thickness of tears in his voice. 

Dave kissed him again, and John immediately let him in.

This one lasted a lot longer than the first. John’s lips were a little chapped, but so were Dave’s. For a moment, they just held, touching, still, and then that hand slipped past the shell of Dave’s ear, tangled in his hair. Dave reached out and rested his hand on John’s waist, slid it up and around to his shoulders, pulling his best friend in close, half on top of himself. He smelled like fresh air, tasted like the ozone in the air before a storm. And he was crying, Dave suddenly realized, as he could suddenly taste salt on his lips. John pulled away to take a shaky breath, his forehead to Dave’s, before kissing him again, and again, feverishly. Dave’s head swam, and he could only hold on, cupping John’s cheek as gently as he had his own. They held each other in the dark, hands as light and fleeting as ghosts. Sobs bubbled up out of John’s chest, and he heaved and cried miserable, hiccuping little cries, hiding his face in Dave’s chest. 

_“I had another nightmare,” Dave was standing in the doorway to John’s room, in the past, in their shared house. His knees knocked with fear, almost comically, as John sat up in bed and looked at him. He was still half asleep as he folded the blanket back for Dave to climb in._

_“Stay as long as you need,” John yawned as Dave crawled into his nest, getting as close as he dared without touching. They were in uncharted territory here, definitely breaching some sort of weird “no homo” bro code that one or both of them had clung to out of some strange, fragile offshoot of their masculinity all these years._

_That was the first time John had touched him like that, gentle and protective, curling his large, muscular frame around Dave’s wiry one. Nothing could get them like that. Nothing._

_“You’re okay,” John was mumbling to the back of Dave’s head. Dave chalked the arm John had put around him up to his exhaustion, his half-awake state when Dave had come to him. He couldn’t let himself believe it was genuine, that there were any feelings attached other than the platonic, that John would do it all the time given half a chance. He couldn’t let the thought get into his head, because he knew that to do that would make it hurt worse when the reality of the action set in, and it was not as meaningful as Dave wanted it to be._

“Are you real?” John whispered into Dave’s chest, in the present.

Dave was unsure how to respond. When he closed his eyes, he still saw Karkat’s face, tears tinged red pouring down his cheeks. Those wide, yellow-red eyes, the fear in them.

“Yes,” he said, petting John’s curls down and kissing the crown of his head. Dave could tell he was falling asleep like this, and that he himself would not be far behind. The tension bled out of John’s shoulders, his limbs growing slack and relaxed. His weight felt comforting, protective. Dave swallowed the lump in his throat, choked back his own pain.

“Are you sure?” John asked.

He was snoring before Dave could respond. Dave was thankful for it; he was less and less sure of the answer to that with each passing day. 

When he finally slipped into sleep again, Dave dreamt of foggy lavender clouds and the smell of blood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay, i think i know where im going with this now  
> :-)


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rose begins to feel the pressure. John and Dave have a homecoming.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi folks! just wanted to pop in at the top of things and say, this chapter gets a little gross, so mind the tags if youre not into violence/gore. 
> 
> thank you for the kudos, i really appreciate them! happy reading!

_Whump._

Dave’s eyes opened at the sound. He glanced around him in the low light, still trying to blink sleep away. It was morning now, but barely. John was still there this time, his back turned to Dave as he snored softly.

_Whump. Whump._

This time it was louder. John shot awake and sat up, nearly cracking the back of his head into Dave’s nose. Dave grabbed at John’s shoulder, knuckles white with anxiety as the two sat in silence, waiting for the next sound. There was a loud crash, like glass shattering. 

“Something is downstairs,” John said. His voice was low and quiet. ‘Something,’ not ‘someone.’ He swung his legs over his side of the bed, opened the drawer of the nightstand on his side. From it, he produced a claw hammer.

“What the fuck, John?” Dave hissed.

“Stay behind me,” John was already moving for the door. Dave scrambled to his feet and limped after him. The door creaked softly as they stepped into the hall. Dave was only half surprised to see Jade standing there, her hair a wild black cloud around her head. The three of them huddled together at the top of the stairs, and Dave was very aware of the absence of their fourth companion.

“Where’s Rose?” Dave whispered. Jade only gave a shake of her head, and his stomach sank. Was she okay? Had something happened to her?

Together, they approached the staircase. John first, Dave in the rear behind Jade despite his whispered protests at the top of the stair landing. He insisted that despite his ankle he was battle ready, but his friends disagreed. Not only did Dave not currently have a weapon on him, but also, if he needed to escape, he was wounded already, Jade and John argued. Though he knew they were right, it still burned him up a bit. As careful and quietly as they were able the three descended, John pointing out where the creaking stairs were and what to avoid. Downstairs, the crashing had stopped, and was replaced by a rapid, rustling sound, like papers fluttering. Another _whump!_ , much louder and closer this time, nearly made Dave leap out of his skin. As John crept to the point on the staircase where he could see into the living room, he froze, his body language relaxing slightly, though he continued brandishing the hammer. 

“Rose?”

The group reached the bottom of the staircase, stopping at the last step on John’s signal. Dave saw Rose, still in her pajamas, standing in front of the bookcase on the wall beside the fireplace in John’s living room. This shelf had a dual purpose: holding a wide variety of books, fiction and non, in addition to being a display case for Mr. Egbert’s absurd harlequin figures. Many of said harlequins were shattered on the ground at Rose’s feet. A pile of discarded books surrounded her, thrown hither and yon across the carpet. Dave’s heart pounded in his ears as Rose turned to face them, a book still in her grasp. Her eyes were solid white, ringed with intense black circles, and strands of her hair floated delicately on an unseen breeze. An increasingly familiar stab of pain shot through Dave’s head again, and he staggered against the wall as he tried to push past John and Jade to approach her. He saw a flash of Rose’s mother in his mind, lying in a pool of blood on an unfamiliar marble floor. He pushed through the pain and rushed to her side, ignoring Jade and John’s calls of concern. 

“Rose, wake up,” Dave asked pleadingly, but she did not seem to see him. She was staring over his head at John with her creepy, dead white eyes. He snapped his fingers in front of her face. No response. “Rose! Fucking wake up!”

When she didn’t respond the second time, Dave grabbed her by the shoulders. Their eyes locked, and he felt like a bolt of lightning shot through his body. 

In his mind, Dave saw Rose, floating above him an impossible height off the ground. She was young, probably about thirteen, and wearing a black floor-length velvet dress emblazoned with what appeared to be an angrier version of one of Jade’s beloved Squiddles. A long sash made of purple satin was tied around her waist, and in her hands she held a pair of knitting needles that looked sharp enough to stab out the eyes of whatever foolish creature happened to cross her. Her skin was a horrific grey, greyer than a corpse, as if her very blood had turned inky black in her veins. Her eyes glowed white like hot coals, and all around her tendrils of a swirling black energy coiled and writhed. On the floor below her were two bodies, covered in blood and viscera. The first was her own mother, just as Dave had seen her in his mind, with a trickle of blood running from the corner of her mouth, and John’s father, his rib cage a mess of hacked stab wounds and chips of bone. They appeared to have been there for a good while, as their blood had oozed and spread out across the marble in a large puddle. Rose thrummed and pulsed with energy as she hovered above the scene, unintelligible whispers and ringing filling Dave’s head as he watched her take off like a bullet into the sky.

Dave let go of her and stumbled back, falling flat on his ass on the rug. Rose seemed like she was waking up now, her violet eyes wide with shock and confusion. She had also backed away, her back colliding with the bookcase, and a few more of the tomes on the shelf flopped sadly to the ground. She was sweating and breathing hard as Jade rushed to her side and John to his. The room felt cold, and deathly quiet as they all looked around each other, none any more sure of what to say than the other. Jade gently took Rose’s arm, guided her over to the sofa, and helped her sit. John did the same, though they seemed now to be taking great care to keep Rose and Dave separated. Had they seen something too when Dave touched her?

“Rose,” Jade was asking, as the ringing in Dave’s ears began to fade. “Are you alright? What happened?”

Rose was quiet, staring at the floor. Dave was watching her, wondering what she had been seeing. Her eyes…was what he just saw in his vision about to happen to her in the present, had they not stopped her? They all waited for her to collect herself in suspenseful silence. “Hand me a book,” she finally said quietly. “No, two or three. Any of the ones in the pile. It doesn’t matter.”

With a confused grimace, Jade returned to the bookcase and selected three books off the top of the pile that had formed on the living room floor. She brought them back and set the stack gingerly in Rose’s lap. Rose opened the cover of the first, a copy of Charles Dickens’ _Great Expectations_ , and smoothed it open to the first page. Dave frowned. The words were formatted and printed the same as they may have been for this book, but…

“Does that say ‘meow?’” John asked, and he was right. Over and over, no matter what page Rose flipped to, that was all it said: MEOWMEOWMEOWMEOWMEOW, on and on. She discarded the Dickens to the floor, picked up the next, Stephen King’s _Desperation_ , and flipped it open to the center. This one was the same. The third, they knew, would be the exact same. 

“What does that even mean?” Jade asked. 

“It’s a genetic code,” Rose explained. Her voice was strained with exhaustion. “I remember it from our beginnings in Sburb. Its significance is foggy, but I believe it had something to do with the creation of, for lack of a better phrase, a god. Or gods, of sorts. I had documented it in my journals. Unfortunately, I cannot remember many details other than that. I could not sleep last night, and thought a book would be a good way to self-soothe. Unfortunately I was mistaken.”

Dave took the King book and stared at it, as if willing it to go back to normal. He distinctly remembered borrowing this from John not six months ago. When he opened the back cover, he even saw John’s name written down the spine in the back in blue marker. It was the same copy. When he looked up, John was also staring at it knowingly. 

“I am afraid the landscape is shifting again,” Rose went on. She was pressing her middle fingertip and thumb against her eyelids. Dave could practically feel her headache in his own skull. Why didn't John and Jade seem to have this issue? “Things are changing the more aware we become, and in ways that I cannot even hope to explain. There is a fog in my head, and no matter what I do, I cannot shake it. I fear the longer we stay here, the more it will try to break us or force us back into submission. It is going to try to keep us here for as long as it can, through any means necessary. Something must be done.”

The four of them sat in silence, letting Rose’s words sink in. Jade held her hands tightly, knelt beside her on the floor. Rose was like Dave in that she was not fond of physical affection, but she seemed grateful for the anchor of her friend’s touch. Dave wondered if it was the only thing keeping her tethered to reality at this point. She looked worn, like she was being pulled in a million directions at once, and she was using every ounce of energy to keep herself together.

“What should we do?” John finally asked. “How do we prepare for it?”

“For now, we should just stick together. Always in twos if not the four of us, buddy system style. We have no idea what’s out there, or when it will get angry,” Jade said. ‘when,’ not ‘if.’ Her voice quivered a bit on the last word, but the three of them knew better than to mention it. “And…we should probably brush up on our combat skills.”

Dave grimaced at that. He hadn’t touched a sword in ages. The ones that hung on his bedroom wall at home were next to useless, anyway. Suddenly, a thought occurred to him, and Dave turned to look at John. “Dude. Our house.”

“What about—” he stopped himself, and then it dawned on him. “We have to go check it out.”

Dave could see the gears turning in his best friend’s head. What had become of their home? Would the game have swallowed it up, pretended it never existed in the first? Would they be able to tell if it had changed at all, or would the comforts of home lull them into complacency again? Dave remembered John’s words from the night before. _“Will what we’ve built together go away?_ His stomach was tying itself in knots. What if it all just dissolved, blew away on the wind? 

John was on his feet. He walked over to the bookshelf and rummaged around in the pile until he found a half-empty college-ruled notebook, emblazoned with doodles and stickers from his middle school days, then returned to the sofa. “We need to make a plan,” he explained, concentrating as he scribbled some things onto the first sheet of blank paper. The list, when he was finished, read as follows:

  
1.) Gather supplies  
2.) Weapons  
3.) Check the house  
4.) Setup base  
5.) Documentation/Research  
6.) Find the door

“If any of you think of anything else, add it,” he said, handing the pen and paper to Rose. “Rose, if you don’t mind, can you write down as much as you can remember?”

Rose grimaced. She still looked utterly spent. “John, that would take years.”

“Yeah, well, just give us the highlights and the important stuff. Focus on the endgame. See if you can figure out how we ended up here,” he had stood, and was pacing the floor, one hand in his messy hair and the other on his hip. It was finally light outside now, but no birds chirped outside the window. Not a sound floated in on the breeze. The jig was up, and there was no need for that sort of vestigial detail. The game was preparing, biding its time, conserving itself. It couldn’t waste any energy on minor aesthetic details.

“John, if we’re going home, we should do it soon,” Dave pointed out. “If we wait too long, the game might get rid of it entirely, and I don’t have a leg to stand on here. Er, a sword to stab with, I guess.”

Nobody commented on how lame the words sounded coming out of his mouth. John was nodding, only half listening. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right.”

“Should we stay here?” Jade asked. “Or should we set up camp at you guys’ house?”

John took a deep breath, then sighed. “I think…I think the game will keep Dad’s house over ours. It’s where everything started, y’know? Our place was just… I dunno, a side quest. I honestly can’t really remember much about it anymore. It all seems so far away.” He looked sad, and Dave felt like he had been kicked in the heart. 

John looked so lost. It hit extra hard, knowing how normal everything had been just days before. Dave could remember the morning he’d left for the airport the last time clearly. John was sitting on the kitchen counter in a t-shirt and boxers, drinking his coffee and swinging his crossed ankles. Whitney Houston belted out of the speakers of his dad’s hand-me-down Victrola, her voice warm and buzzing with that old-fashioned vinyl hum. John nodded along to the music, and when Dave rolled his suitcase to the front door, John had looked up from scrolling on his phone, giving him a smile so bright Dave actually felt like he needed his sunglasses inside for something other than looking cool. The memory was heavy in his mind as Dave watched John break from the group and walk to the window. He was staring at his tire swing now, swaying on a morning breeze, both hands gripping the edge of the counter.

“We will stay here for now and try to gather our ranks,” Rose spoke up. “Jade and I will search the house for usable materials and weaponry. Maybe we will have some luck in unraveling this yarn a little further,” she stood and walked to the window with John, resting a delicate hand between his broad shoulders in reassurance. He looked at her, and in profile Dave could see the desperation in his face. “It will be alright. We will get through this together, just like we always have. Do not worry, John.”

He smiled at her, but it didn’t meet his eyes.

The plan decided, the four of them set to work on their respective tasks. John kept his claw hammer looped through his belt, though at Rose's behest he was beginning to tinker with something neither of them could remember using in nigh on a decade: their strife specibi and sylladice. Dave’s memory of the concept felt fuzzy at best, but as they fiddled with the weird, abstract mechanics, Dave was shocked to discover that the two of them were more loaded than previously thought. Armed to the teeth, really. With some concentration, Dave was shocked to see a long, Arthurian blade leap seemingly out of thin air and into his palm. It buzzed with energy, and he felt comforted, like he was shaking the hand of an old friend. “Caledfwlch,” he said, and the sword pulsed at its name. Smiling to himself, Dave returned it to his inventory.

“How the fuck did your mouth even make that sound, dude?” John laughed, and it sounded genuine again. Dave smiled at him and shrugged. “Here, my turn,” John said, scrunching up his face, and a massive hammer appeared in his hand. The two of them had been standing so close that Dave had to flashstep out of the way to avoid being struck by the ridiculous thing’s huge head. John staggered forward with its weight, but quickly righted himself, standing up and brandishing the weapon. It looked absurd; it was blue except for a section of the head that connected the head to the handle, which was yellow and emblazoned on both sides with the zodiac sign for Scorpio. The whole thing was a little longer than your standard sledgehammer, and the head was flat and square on the front. The back bore a strange red dome full of dice, like the center of a _Sorry!_ game board. The handle grip had a sort of weird, pincer-like shape on the bottom, while a large barbed horn protruded from the top. 

“Jesus Christ,” Dave said.

“Vrillyhoo!” John exclaimed, laughing brightly. He swung the hammer a couple times with childlike glee, narrowly missing one of the lamps on his bedside. It vanished into thin air as he returned it to his sylladex. Clearly, he was feeling better, and Dave was relieved. They each packed a bag of provisions, re-wrapped Dave’s ankle bandage as well as reinforcing it with a makeshift splint made from some old rulers they found in John’s desk and some duct tape, and steeled themselves for the journey ahead. Seattle was only about half an hour from the house in Maple Valley, but as uncertain as things were becoming, who knew how long it would actually take. As Rose had said, the landscape was shifting again. By the time they had gotten dressed and to the car, Dave’s leg was getting sore again, but he pushed on through the pain. If he couldn’t deal now, what would happen when the actual monsters came back? He could practically hear Bro in his ear, patronizing him, calling him a pussy for letting it get to him. He grit his teeth at the thought. 

As they drove away from the Egbert residence, Dave stared out the window of the car. He noticed, in passing, the neighbor he had seen the morning before, frozen in space and time at her mailbox, hand still extended toward the door. As they reached the end of the street and turned, the air shimmered around the old woman, and she blinked out of existence.

*****

Dave didn’t realize he had dozed off until the car came to a stop. He sat up and looked around. They were parked in the street outside their little bungalow, which looked the same as it ever had. The concrete steps leading to the front walk and the roof were dusted with snow. John had fallen in love with the house the second he saw it; it was a sunny yellow color, with white trim, dark shutters, and a wide front porch complete with a swing. When it stormed, John was often found out there watching the rain with a cup of coffee and a blanket. Dave preferred to hole up in the cradle of the bay window, where he could watch people pass by on the street below without having to venture out into the great outdoors, but many days they had sat on that porch together, sipping iced tea with bourbon or watching squalls and snowstorms roll in. 

Though they weren’t visible from the street, he knew their garden beds sat empty in the back yard, waiting for summer to return. John had asked Jade to help him set them up and teach the boys how to grow their own food on one of her visits, and she had been thrilled. For two summers, John and Dave had tended the beds with the utmost care. Dave felt a lump rise in his throat as he thought about John standing on the back porch in his stupidly adorable straw hat and gardening gloves, a huge basket of freshly harvested beans and tomatoes on his hip. Dave had teased him and told him he looked like his Nanna. John had responded by throwing a tomato at the back of his head when he wasn’t looking. 

“Let’s go in, then. Remember, grab essentials only,” John said, snapping Dave out of his thoughts. Despite his protests that he could do it on his own, John helped Dave climb out of the car and up the front steps, one at a time. The leisurely pace was equal parts reluctance to go inside and care not to further irritate Dave’s busted ankle. They stepped onto the front porch and paused, looking at the front door. John took his keys out of his pocket and unlocked the front door. As he turned it, Dave was again struck with the memory of them on the battlefield, John turning the knob of the red door. Together, they stepped into their dark house and closed the door behind them.

“Oh, fuck,” John whispered.

When they had left for the party, John had still been home alone. When Dave left for long trips, John typically took it upon himself to deep-clean the place, because despite Dave’s best efforts, he was always a bit of a mess. John likened it to a bird making a nest; Dave didn’t like it when John picked up whatever blanket he had curled up on the couch with and re-folded it, even if Dave had left the room and didn’t seem to be coming back. He insisted he had “just gotten it the way he liked it” and didn’t want it messed with. He would set to work on something, whether it be a painting, editing a batch of photos, or any number of other creative projects, and John would find pens, pencils, little tubes of paint wedged between couch cushions and scattered throughout the house. Once, he had found Dave’s stylus for his tablet in the medicine cabinet of one of the bathrooms behind a bottle of ibuprofen. Dave had been so frazzled looking for it that John had decided to prank him further by wordlessly tucking it back into the magnetic holder on his tablet. When Dave finally saw it back in there, he looked around like he expected to see a ghost in the house. John had gotten a good laugh out of it.

He had spent the better part of a week leading up to the birthday party alone in the house, tidying and getting it ready for their eventual return home. He had dusted every inch of the place (even the shelves of old cameras and jarred wet specimens in Dave’s room), bleached and scrubbed the bathrooms until they shone, made the beds, and rearranged the kitchen. He had flopped down on their couch when he was finished, freshly showered and satisfied with his work. John loved that house. He had saved up to buy it for two solid years before he and Dave moved in together. He’d driven by it every day on his way to class, then work. It was like it was made specifically for him, and it was calling out to him. Now, John was realizing that that was intentional. The house was a honey pot, the game’s way of luring him in and keeping him comfortable and happy. 

When they stepped inside the threshold, immediately things were amiss. The kitchen doorway, to the right of the entry, was lit intermittently by a flickering, flashing light, like a power surge was making the fluorescents pop and flash. The dining table that sat in the nook by Dave’s beloved bay window was floating a solid foot off the ground. The six chairs and the centerpiece, a ceramic vase full of dried flowers, levitated as well, rotating around it as if in orbit. Beyond the dining area, the living room was partially obscured by a veil of pixelated nonsense, glitching and blinking in awkward contrast of the strobing light coming from the kitchen. 

Dave touched John’s arm to get his attention. Both stared around the dark house, taking in the changes. 

“What should we do?” he asked.

Wordlessly, John started off down the hall, eyes glassy like he was in a trance. The floorboards didn’t creak underfoot anymore, Dave noticed as he went. Instead his footfalls echoed hollowly as he approached the door to his bedroom, almost all the way at the back of the house. It seemed to be intact still, but John hesitated to open it. Dave had followed, stopping at the intersection of the main hallway and the one that led to his own bedroom. While John wasn’t looking, Dave had drawn his sword again, that huge Welsh monstrosity. John looked longingly at him and thought, briefly, that maybe when he opened that door, they would wake up again, and the nightmare would be over. 

Dave stepped around the corner to his own door, disappearing. “On three?” He called. 

“On three,” John affirmed, and together they counted down. 

“One…Two…Three.” 

They each turned the knobs to their respective doors and stepped inside.

*****

If John hadn’t been so blown away by what he saw upon entry, he might have noticed the door slamming shut behind him of its own accord.

John had taken great care to make his room homey, because he had discovered soon after moving in that he missed his dad more than he had expected. He had hung lots of photos on the wall: a few of him and his Dad, one of his and Dave’s feet in the water of the lake by John’s house, the photo of him with Dave, Jade, and Rose on his sixteenth birthday. A row of candid Polaroid shots that Dave liked to take of stuff they did together were pinned to the wall around the various frames. For his birthday one year, Dave had gotten him a nice large print of a shot he had taken the previous Christmas of John and his dad in the kitchen together, both facing away from the camera. John’s dad was looking at his son and smiling softly, his face illuminated in profile with light coming in from the kitchen window. It was John’s favorite. The rest of the walls were adorned with framed movie posters, some shadowboxes with various keepsakes in them, and even a painting Dave had done in college. He had positioned his desk right by the window. Presently, the curtains and blinds were still open, letting the gloomy light of Seattle in December shine on the stacks of papers and journals strewn on the desktop around John’s laptop. At the foot of his bed sat John’s old magic chest, still full of his books and clever disguises.

The bed itself was huge, covered in what Dave called “an excessive number of blankets.” Over the short span from senior year of high school to college, John had had a final growth spurt and shot up from 5’11” to 6’3”, even taller than his Dad, and his summer job working at a local warehouse had made him bulk up. He outgrew everything, even the bigger bed his Dad had gotten him for his childhood room. When he had bought the house, he bought himself the biggest mattress he could afford as a housewarming present to himself. Often he spent the days he was alone while Dave was on business holed up in a pile of pillows and blankets, watching movies. It had been extra helpful when Dave had started climbing into bed with him in the middle of the night, or on days when he was so jet lagged and exhausted that he would fall dead asleep while talking to John about his trip, sometimes still sitting up. 

As John stepped inside, he was immediately faced with a figure, back turned. Black fedora, white dress shirt, grey slacks with a black belt. Spotless, immaculately polished black shoes.

“Dad?” his voice quivered.

The man didn’t move, but all around him, the furniture began to shiver and shake, lifting off the floor like the table in the dining room. The Polaroids plucked themselves into the air and began to float by on a breeze. John’s heart began to race, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the figure. 

“Dad, what are you doing here?” he reached out a hand, touched him on the shoulder. 

The face that turned to face him was blank, eyeless. John screamed, but no one could hear. The house made quite sure of that.

*****

Dave had immediately tried to turn back as soon as he set foot into his own bedroom. The slam of the door behind him felt final, and he frantically grabbed the knob and tried to open it. It wouldn’t budge. He kicked it hard once, twice. He stepped back, charged, and rammed his shoulder in as hard as he could muster. The door didn’t so much as rattle on its hinges. Winded, Dave stepped away, trying to decide what to do next. His leg was on fire now, protesting painfully under his weight. He swallowed back the panic he felt rising in his chest. Clearly, the game didn’t want him to leave. But what did it want?

A voice, eerily, blood-chillingly familiar, tickled at his left ear.

“Did ya miss me, little bro?”

Slowly, Dave turned around. His room was as he had left it, though the bed was made. The walls were plastered with photos and posters as they always had been, and his desk was loaded with mixers, monitors, and other equipment. A bulletin board mounted to the wall was covered in notes, business cards, snippets of old photo negatives and incorrectly developed Polaroids. A coffee cup full of pens sat on the edge of his desk, the logo printed on it claiming that he was the World’s Best Grandma.

In the middle of his room stood Bro Strider. Sort of.

Bro had always been a big man. He towered over Dave his entire life, a whopping 6’6” and musclebound like a bodybuilder, which made his incredible speed and reflexes all the more shocking to witness. When they were kids, John joked that he was shaped like a Dorito, thanks to his broad shoulders and chest and long, lean legs. It had been funny then, but now, he seemed even larger than life. His presence seemed to warp the room around him, and as Dave stared, he could see gravity failing. His bed floated up off the floor, the cup of pens spilled itself and rose into the air, and the glass rattled in the windowpanes. His face, half-hidden as always by his shades, was changing and morphing with every passing second. One minute, there was a dimple in his chin, then it was gone. His lips changed shape, his nose warped and stretched in a myriad of ways. Dave realized as he watched that it was because he no longer remembered what his brother’s face had looked like in life.

Dave brandished Caledfwlch, though his hands shook with fear. This was not his Bro, and he knew it. How much of a chance did he have of fighting off whatever supercharged monster Sburb had turned him into when he was already such a formidable force as a mortal?

“Stay the fuck away from me man,” Dave snapped. 

Bro tilted his head, smiling eerily wide with the wrong mouth, and his katana materialized in his hand. “Or what?”

He was on Dave in an instant, their blades crashing with a horrible metallic sound Dave had nearly forgotten. His arms strained with the effort of holding Bro back, and with a shout, he threw his entire weight into his swing. Bro tumbled backwards, landing on his feet, and rushed Dave again. Dave lifted his sword to block Bro’s next strike, but it never came. Instead, Bro leapt and twisted midair, his foot connecting hard with Dave’s chest. Dave’s body was hurled through the wall, wood and drywall crashing and exploding around him. His body collided hard with the wall opposite his bedroom, knocking what little air he had left in his lungs out, and he lay limp on the floor, wheezing. 

“Dave!” 

Distantly, Dave could hear John’s voice. He was pounding on his bedroom door from the inside, trying desperately to escape. His brain couldn’t quite keep up, but Dave knew his friend was in trouble, and he forced himself to his feet. He coughed and spat out blood. Bro was charging again as he finally got up, swinging his blade right at Dave’s face. Dave parried and retreated down the hall, stopping in front of John’s room and trying the knob. It wouldn’t budge, and he could still hear John screaming. 

“I’m gonna get you out of there dude!” he shouted as Bro reached him again. Their blades clashed once, twice as they darted in and away, circling each other like a pair of big cats. Dave’s chest heaved for breath, but Bro didn’t seem at all phased by the fight; his hair was still perfectly spiked out from around his ball cap, his stupid white polo spotless from hem to popped collar. He charged Dave like a bull and leapt into the air again, hacking downward with vicious intent. Dave only had time to dodge, and even then the sword’s tip slashed across his right cheek, dangerously close to his eye. Blood spattered on the hardwood, and Dave sidestepped to avoid slipping on it. Bro was pushing him back toward the front door, away from John’s room, his strikes coming closer and closer for comfort. 

Dave weighed his options: go toward the kitchen, to which they had not quite assessed the extent of the damage, or head for the living room, which was increasingly warped and shimmery with a haze of glitch, dust, and electrical pulses. The latter quickly became the only option as Bro put himself between Dave and the kitchen doorway. Dave tried to keep Bro back, but another swift kick to Dave’s injured ankle made him howl with pain and stagger against the sliding glass doors to the sunroom. The glass spiderwebbed with cracks under his weight, but held together. He scrambled to sit up and block with his sword, but Bro was faster, and he jabbed the point of his blade to Dave’s larynx hard enough to draw a rivulet of blood.

Bro’s grin warped and stretched across his face. The same flickers of electricity from the glitch stuff in the living area glimmered and popped in his glasses and around his head like a halo. The illusion was tearing itself apart at the seams, the game unable to keep itself contained into this approximation of Bro Strider’s vessel. Dave’s entire body shook as he watched, and he knew that this was it. Would he be killed? Or would the game use Bro to get back into his head and manipulate him into complacency? He couldn’t decide which was worse, and debated shoving himself forward on the blade that was slowly puncturing his skin. If he had to choose between being a pawn, risking the game pitting him against his dear friends, and death, death was the nobler option, he thought.

When Bro spoke, his voice echoed and reverberated like he was shouting into a cave full of water and sparking wires. “You know better than to fight it, little brother,” he laughed, the sound like TV static. “you know you can’t beat me, you never could. You can never match up to me, god powers or not. I will always be bigger than you, I will always be stronger. I made you in my image, and you can never hope to reach the echelon I oversee. You are but a copy of a far superior original.”

Dave laughed, trying to sound defiant, but it just came out weak and sad. “The irony of that fucking statement, man. You aren’t him! My Bro is dead, and good riddance. You’re just as much a copy as I am.”

That grin melted into a sneer as the Bro-thing leaned in, tangerine eyes visible now over the rims of the pointy anime shades. There were no whites to its eyes; instead, there was only inky blackness around the irises, leaking down its cheeks. It opened its mouth impossibly wide, unhinging its jaw full of too many teeth, hot breath washing over Dave’s face as it shrieked. It reeked of copper wire and the smell of burning flesh. Dave closed his eyes tightly, waiting for the final blow, and then—

It stopped as suddenly as it started. There was a sickening _CRACK!_. Dave flinched, but the sword was gone from his throat. He opened his eyes.

Bro’s body double was still there, its arms at its sides, twitching and trembling all over. The sword fell out of its grip and clattered to the floor. His head was gone, black ooze like motor oil gushing down from the stump of its neck. Dave had been spattered with some of the viscous gunk. The body twitched horribly and hissed like a steaming kettle before slumping to the side.

John was standing behind it, covered in black goo. His clown hammer was in his hands, the flat head of it covered to the point of dripping with the stuff as well. Dave quickly pieced together what had happened, and looked toward the living room. Wherever the head had gone, it was swallowed up by the thickening glitch-storm in there. 

“We have to go,” John was saying, and Dave barely registered that he was close now, trying to haul Dave to his feet. His ankle protested, and Dave moaned in pain, biting hard on his lip to stop the sound. John half-dragged half-carried Dave to the front door, out onto the porch, and down the concrete steps. He didn’t stop until he had set Dave down in the passenger seat and handed him the keys. 

“If I’m not back in five minutes, drive home and get help,” he said urgently, holding Dave’s hand around the car keys.

“Are you fucking nuts?!” Dave shouted. He was shaking violently, both with pain and fear. John shook his head and tried to speak, but Dave stopped him. “I don’t—John, I am not leaving you here, just get in the car, we have to go.”

John shook his head again and stepped back, slamming the door in Dave’s face before he could get out and follow. “I’m coming right back,” he insisted, and ran back up the steps and into the house. 

Dave waited four and a half agonizing minutes. John finally reappeared, a backpack over his shoulder and, to Dave’s surprise, Bro’s katana in one hand. He took the stairs two at a time and tossed the backpack and sword into the back seat as he got into the driver’s side, locking the doors and speeding away from the house without another word. As they drove, John reached out a hand, and Dave took it, lacing their grimy fingers together and squeezing tightly. He couldn’t bring himself to ask how John had escaped his bedroom, or what he had seen in there. He could infer from his own experiences. 

When they finally pulled into the driveway of the Egbert house, the sky was darkening and turning green. Dave remembered distantly watching tornadoes roll in in Texas, and how the sky didn't look this scary even then. It reminded him of the eerie planet from his memories of his conversation with Dirk. John parked and ran around to his side, helping him get out of the low-slung vehicle. Dave’s ankle was worse, now, and he worried it might actually be broken this time as John hobbled him up to the front door. They entered the house, and noticed it was eerily quiet. To their horror, there were signs of a struggle. A towel smeared with blood lay across the back of the sofa, and more of that horrible black liquid all over the floor. The rug was gone, and there were smear marks heading into the utility room.

“Rose?” John called out. “Jade?”

The smell of burning reached them, and Dave pointed for the utility room. “Back yard.”

The two of them tracked blackened footprints across the house as they headed for the back door. Rose and Jade were sitting outside in lawn chairs by the fire pit. The living room rug, rolled up and tied with what looked like torn sheets, was in the pit, and some of the books from the living room had been ripped up to use as kindling. The flames licked high into the sky, nearly blazing higher than John was tall. Jade looked up as they stepped into the yard. She had a bandage covering one eye and the side of her face, her glasses sitting on top of the already bloody gauze wrap. Rose was drinking directly from a bottle of vodka as she stared into the fire.

“What the fuck happened here?” John asked, but Dave knew. His heart sank as he pointed at the pair of feet poking out of the rug’s rolled end. One foot still had one of Mom Lalonde’s black pumps on it.

Wordlessly, Rose glanced at Dave as John sat him down in a lawn chair beside her. Her face was streaked with black, a mixture of the oily blood of the game’s monsters and her own mascara tears. She offered Dave the bottle of vodka, and he gratefully accepted. Together, the four of them watched the fire envelop the body in silence. The smoke that billowed into the sky shimmered and crackled with electricity. John knelt at Rose's side and wrapped her in a tight hug. The only sounds were the crackle of the flames and their soft sobs.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dave gets some exposition, but things are just as confusing as ever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey y'all
> 
> long time no see! i have been neglecting this fic a bit, because unfortunately, i have gotten a bit burnt out. i don't want to post subpar work but i also feel like i need to just get it out of my system. sorry if it's boring!! i just need to work out some of the details before we get back into the meat of things.
> 
> i appreciate all your comments & kudos!! please continue to leave those, they mean so much to me.

The next day, by far, was easier.

Dave had struggled to fall asleep when all was said and done. It was late when they finally finished cleaning up the gore downstairs, showered, and performed all the necessary first aid. He expected something to wake him in the middle of the night again, some new creature or force of nature, and though the adrenaline had worn off hours ago, he couldn’t close his eyes for more than a few seconds before they were wide open again and scanning the shadows. He lay in the dark next to John, long after he had started snoring and talking in his sleep, and stared at the ceiling. Waiting. Something would be coming, any second, and he would have to fight again. 

Eventually, he blinked, and when he opened his eyes again the sun was shining brightly through the curtains. He sat up and peered around the room. He didn’t remember dreaming, and it was just him in the bed this time, John long gone judging by the coolness of the sheets. Next to his side of the bed, there was a pair of old wooden crutches that Jade had dug out of the utility room propped against the wall. His phone was plugged into the charger on the table next to a bottle of over the counter pain medication, a glass of water, and what appeared to be a strawberry pop-tart. A folded note with dave!! :)  written on it was propped against the lamp. 

Yawning, Dave looked down at his wristwatch and was shocked to see it was already after noon. He swung his legs over the side of the mattress and stretched, his muscles groaning in protest. Looking at himself Dave could see that he was developing some bruises from his fight the day previous, and his injured ankle looked a bit worse for wear. Jade and John had done their best to re-wrap it after the battle, but without proper medical supplies it was just kind of sad-looking, made of an ace bandage and some scrap wood they had found in the utility room (the rulers from yesterday’s wrap had snapped immediately on contact with the kick Bro’s game ghost had given him). Gingerly touching the bruise that had begun to poke out over the top of the bandage, Dave picked up the note and began to read.

>   
>  dave,
> 
> if we are not back when you wake up, don’t panic!! john, rose, and i are going to see if we can find anything interesting around the neighborhood. don’t worry if you sleep all day, you’ve earned it!! and eat your breakfast, you’re going to need the energy :)
> 
> love,  
>  jade <333333  
> 

Dave half smiled as he put the note down and shook a few ibuprofen capsules into his palm. He swallowed them dry and set about opening the pop-tart. As he ate, rolling yesterday’s events over in his head and trying to decide what to do for the rest of the day, there was a soft knock on the door.

“Come in,” he called.

The door opened, and Rose stepped inside. She looked better than she had last night, when she was still drunk and raw with grief, but the way she winced at the light let Dave know she wasn’t in the best shape either. Dave had gulped a few healthy mouthfuls of the vodka to dull the pain. Rose had downed the rest of the bottle. She crossed the room and sat down beside him on the mattress. Dave offered her a piece of his pop tart, which she politely declined.

“How do you feel?” Rose asked.

Dave shrugged. “Haven’t tried to stand up. Otherwise I think I’m alright. How about you? Did y’all find anything interesting out there?”

The sad smile Dave got in response was answer enough, but Rose brushed a strand of white hair behind her ear and sighed. “No, nothing. Just empty houses for miles. And, well, I must say, being forced to kill a double of my mother was ah…not exactly how I planned to spend my birthday. Though I am preaching to the choir, I suppose.”

He snorted a humorless laugh as he stuffed the last bite of pop-tart in his mouth. “Yeah,” he mumbled as he chewed. Rose gave him a distasteful look, but he kept talking. “Seeing Bro again wasn’t exactly a cakewalk either.”

She nodded, and they sat in silence as Dave drained the glass of water. When he was finished, he sat back on his palms and looked at Rose, analyzing her uncomfortable posture. “What is it?”

Rose scoffed. “What, can I not check in on the well-being of a friend without suspicion of ulterior motives?”

“You could, if you weren’t avoiding looking at me like the crispy pair of boxers stuck to the bathroom floor that nobody wants to claim,” at that, she looked at him, squinting with disgust, and he smiled. “That’s more like it. What do you want to talk to me about?”

Rose deflated, and for a moment Dave regretted asking. Her violet eyes were darker than usual, and he got the impression she hadn’t slept much. It wasn’t often she looked so bedraggled, and he assumed most of it had to do with the events of the past few days, but there was something behind her gaze that told him she had something important to tell him. Delicately, she pulled her legs up onto the mattress and sat cross-legged, facing Dave, and reached out for his hands. Dave was too concerned to deny her the contact, and so he mirrored her posture. Her grip was warm and soft, comforting to them both as she began.

“I have some things that I have wanted to discuss with you for a while now, but we have not had a moment alone thus far,” she began, keeping level eye contact. Dave didn’t dare look away, even when his stomach rolled with discomfort. “Truth be told, I have not been as forthcoming with you all as I should have been. For years now, really, even before…well. I acknowledge the error of my ways in that regard. I thought that what I was doing would protect us from further harm. To make up for it, I have had similar discussions with Jade and John this morning, on our little venture into the neighborhood. John told me that you have been dreaming of Karkat.”

His name sent a prickle across Dave’s scalp, and he sat up a little straighter. “You remember him?”

Rose nodded slowly. “I remember a great deal more than the three of you do, it would seem. Would you…” she hesitated again. Dave wondered why this gave her quite so much pause. It was very much unlike Rose to walk on eggshells around him for any reason. “Would you like me to tell you about it?”

“Yeah. I’d like that, yeah.”

"Alright. Let's start with the meteor."

Rose explained life on the meteor that Dave had seen in flashes over the years. It was a rambling, metallic sprawl of bunker-like buildings, with few comforts to speak of before they had put the alchemizing machinery to work. As she described it to him, Dave’s brain puzzle-pieced things together. He remembered sleepless nights, near indiscernible from the days due to a lack of a sun rising and setting, the vastness of space streaking by. Drinking watery coffee in a common area with Rose, both of them wearing strange uniforms with vaguely familiar symbols on the chests. He remembered wandering the halls alone, exploring the many darkened rooms full of strange equipment: monitors, large glass tanks, slime, metal tubing. Rose told him about the horrible things that had happened there before their arrival, the death and destruction, and Dave could almost smell the blood. 

“There were six of us,” She explained. “You and I joined the remaining trolls after we blew up the Green Sun and reached God Tier.”

“God tier,” Dave said thoughtfully. As the words left his mouth, he felt their familiarity fill another recess in his brain. “We died, didn’t we?” 

Rose nodded again. “Yes, though I would point out that you had a great deal more experience with death than the majority of us, given your time powers.”

Dave hummed in reply. Over and over, he had dreamed of his deaths and his lives, countless versions of himself splitting off through various timelines. Throughout it all he felt the ticking of the clock in the back of his awareness, the flow of time through his body like his own bloodstream. Before, he had tried to write it off as his subconscious fucking with him. Somehow, he always knew what time it was, or how long or how quickly things seemed to be happening around him. He had always been aware of the passage of time, but he had never given much thought as to why. His therapist had said it was anxiety related, something about his feelings of inadequacy making him feel like he was running out of time. That had made sense at the time. Now, he knew better. Now, he could see himself in a memory, not a dream, thirteen years old, standing on a rooftop in an ocean of lava, a set of floating turntables at his sides. He knew that if he were to lay his hands on them and spin, music wasn’t something they were meant to affect. 

Rose explained the purpose of their journey. Their meteor was heading to another universe, another session, in hopes that they could escape their doomed fate. Another chance, a way to cheat death. She explained to him the other passengers on their journey, only vaguely touching on most of them. She told him about the citizens of Prospit and Derse, and the one they called the Mayor, the mention of which brought a pang of bittersweet joy to Dave’s heart. Even Rose smiled a bit talking about him, but the sad look she had in her eyes told him that the Mayor’s fate might not have been a happy one. He resisted the temptation to ask. It was impossible not to notice the way her face shifted when she spoke about Kanaya; she softened, and her eyes took on a dreamy glaze.. He didn't ask about that, either. Rose’s eyebrows pinched together in concentration as she talked, like it was paining her to get all of this out into the open. Eventually, she lapsed into silence, and Dave took that as a chance to ask a question that had been bothering him.

“So if we all lived through this, how come you remember the most?”

“I suppose it has something to do with my Seer powers. As you so eloquently put it back then, I was somewhat of a ‘fortune teller,’ though really I see that as more of a half-truth. As the Seer of Light, I was able to see many angles of the same scene, as it were, and make predictions based on that.”

They watched each other in silence again, scrutinizing. Rose, usually so calm and cool, looked shaken. So much had been laid out on the table between them, yet it felt like they were still just at the tip of the iceberg. The words came out of Dave’s mouth before he had really considered them. 

“So you knew all this time that you’re really my sister?” He asked.

“Not all this time,” Rose spoke quietly. “But after our first in-person encounter, I felt strongly enough about the matter that I…did some digging, you could say.”

“The fuck is that supposed to mean, Lalonde?” Dave asked, squinting at her.

“I stole some hair off your hairbrush,” she said it so flippantly, like it wasn’t an absolutely batshit thing to say. That was just Rose, though. Thorough and brilliant, if a little off-kilter. As could be expected for a teenage girl with an ectobiology lab in her basement, Dave mused. “I had it tested. It was a match. You are my biological brother. Forgive me for not knowing how to broach the subject with you. ”

“And John and Jade?”

“Yes,” she said, running a hand through her hair. “Siblings as well. Matched sets. Prospit and Derse.”

“Yeah, Rose, I guessed that. I mean did you tell them?”

She nodded. “We discussed it this morning, though they seemed to have already come to that conclusion themselves as well. How could they not, really? I mean, they could be twins.”

Dave hummed his agreement. They really could be. In fact, they very nearly were.

“Dave, I appreciate all this exposition, but I don’t think I need to be the one to remind you that this is not what we are here to discuss, in the end.” 

Dave swallowed the lump in his throat. His palms felt clammy as he fiddled nervously with his watch. “I know.”

“It is nothing to be afraid of,” Rose said. "I used to think it was. I agonized over it. Being a Seer meant some truly awful things for me at first. Not being able to make you all understand, and trust me, I wanted to. I did not keep this from the three of you out of anything but what I believed to be necessity. I was unable to forget, no matter how dearly I wanted to. I drank to forget her. It didn’t get her face out of my mind. I have since learned to cope with reality better, but Kanaya was the love of my life, and one day I woke up and she was nothing but a dream. If I think hard on it I can still…” she trailed off. 

They made eye contact again, fleetingly. Dave got the impression that this time, he was not the only one feeling exposed. Rose had tears in her eyes. He had been there in the dark times, when Rose had developed an intense drinking problem far too young. She would call him crying in the middle of the night, wailing about things that didn’t make sense. Back then, they had all chalked it up to her depression warping her nightmares and the alcohol making it hard to form the words. Her mother always kept plenty of the stuff in the house, and given that she wasn't the best role model, Rose's friends felt that it had, unfortunately, been an inevitable path for her. Now, the lens had shifted, and he could see more of the frame. All those nights that he would lie awake with the phone on speaker, half a country separating them from each other as he worried Rose would harm herself somehow, it had been because of this. His heart ached at the thought; how lonely she must have been, carrying that burden alone. 

Rose took a deep breath, sighed. “This isn’t about us. I apologize. Let me start again.”

“You and Karkat had a unique relationship. It drove most of us batty, though Kanaya was very patient with him. The two of them were close, actually. He saved her life once. It was quite sweet how much they cared for each other. Somewhat motherly,” she smiled fondly. “It was sweet how much the two of you came to care for each other, as well.”

Dave tried to smile back, but he knew it didn’t reach his eyes. Rose went on, but he only half heard what she was saying. He wondered if that had something to do with her Seer powers; she had always been a hell of a storyteller. Rose was talking, but Dave was far away, seeing it in his mind like it was playing out on a screen. Karkat’s face and his gravelly voice came back readily now, memories of nights spent arguing and shouting at each other were undercut with flickers of the quiet moments; lying curled up in a nest of random meteor junk, watching Karkat as he slept fitfully. His eyelids fluttered open, pupils blown wide with sleep and nerves, wary as Dave stroked his coarse black curls. Karkat had nightmares often, as they all did, and he would whimper and chirp in his sleep. Dave couldn’t bear it, that pitiful sound; it was the saddest thing he had ever heard, and he couldn’t let himself just not do anything about it. Anything to break the hold of whatever horror had come for him in his subconscious. 

He hadn’t been expecting Karkat to do the same, but one night he woke, gasping for breath, with a gentle, warm wand resting on his chest. His eyes snapped open, ready to run or draw a sword on the attacker his dreams told him was on him, but only Karkat was there, making a low noise in the back of his throat that sounded like purring.

“What are you doing?” Dave whispered.

“You were crying,” he replied, looking embarrassed. “I wanted to help.”

And though he had done it himself so many times, Dave was stunned by the gesture. Karkat had been right, there were tears rolling down his face, and more only came when Dave let himself relax into Karkat’s touch. It was awkward, at first, but once they had loosely looped their arms around each other in the pile, Dave felt safe, and he hugged Karkat tighter to himself. They woke wrapped in his god tier cape, and Karkat was still purring.

It had been interesting, breaking his shell. Cancer was a fitting sign for him, Dave thought, because he was the crabbiest little bastard on any planet in any universe. Rose was right, it was a unique relationship, considering it started with such anger and vitriol. Dave couldn’t quite make sense of the timelines he was sifting through now, as so many mixed and whirled in his head, but there was such a contrast in their interactions pre-and-post-meteor. Before they met in person, there were conversations that were mostly one-sided walls of belligerent, all-caps grey. It was funny, how things had changed; he was angry and abrasive in real life, and once they had even come to blows with each other in a fit of teenage jealousy, but looking at it all laid out in hindsight, it was so easy to see how much of it was a front. Really, under it all, Karkat was the same as all of them: a terrified little kid, thrust into the apocalypse. 

At first, Dave found Alternian customs strange, and watching Karkat navigate life was interesting, to say the least. The three years they spent on that meteor, Dave watched him and the other trolls curiously, learning new words and concepts every day. More often than he had intended, he watched Karkat. He observed that Karkat had as much trouble sleeping as him, if not more, and didn’t seem comfortable with the Earthly beds that Rose and Dave were used to. He liked to burrow, covering himself up with as much weight as he could, and would build piles of discarded items into a nest before he could even begin to get comfortable. Kanaya would explain the sopor slime-filled pods they were used to back home, the soothing effects of which kept the nightmares to a minimum. The sedative had been the drug of choice for the clown, without which he had gone on his rampage. They had tried to alchemize a substitute, but it was not the same, and without the safety of the recuperacoon and its sedative, Karkat suffered enough. Not only had Gamzee taken that away, but he’d taken the majority of his friends, too. 

About a year and a half into the journey, Dave watched Karkat wander into the common area, grumbling and irritated. He clearly hadn’t slept, a cup of coffee held in one jittery hand, and his eyes darted nervously around the room. He crossed between the various bookshelves, selected one, and skulked over to find a place to settle in. Dave was lounging across the sofa next to the coffee machine, and Karkat selected a chair across the room from him at the table where Rose and Kanaya often worked. He opened the book and hunched over it, a hand tangled in his hair as he pored over what appeared to be one of his trashy romance novels. When he noticed Dave watching him, he looked up and scowled. 

“What?”

Dave tried to play it cool, like he had intended to be caught. “What do you mean what?”

“What the fuck are you looking at?” his voice was as weary as it was annoyed.

Dave shrugged. He paused, probably longer than he should’ve. The anxiety of face-to-face interaction still got to him, sometimes. It was so much easier to type endlessly into a chat box, able to say whatever came to mind into the void of the internet without the intensity of another person gazing back at you, monitoring every word. Karkat’s eyes were vibrant, yellow where a human’s whites would be, but almost catlike in pupil. His thick brows knit together as Dave decided what to say to him. They were alone in the room, the lights dim, and those eyes practically glowed out from his tired face.

“I was just wonderin’ if you were okay,” he said, more earnest than he would have been if there were anyone else around to hear.

Karkat was taken aback. He spluttered, scoffed, took a swig of his coffee. Dave watched him, trying to keep his face placid. Karkat eventually dog-eared the page in his book and closed it. He turned to face Dave, maintaining his cautious distance. 

“I’m fucking fine. Fine as can be, given we’re stuck here on this freezing, useless hunk of rock, and considering half of my friends were murdered in this fucking place, and considering I can’t even get a decent goddamn rest here. I mean, there’s plenty to do for a sweep and a half, right? I can’t sleep, but I could catch up on reading the same handful of books I’ve read five times over by now, or I can get out and see the glorious sights without fear of getting culled for once. What would you like to see? Space? Dilapidated old lab equipment? More space? The meteor has it all! So I’m great. Really. Why the fuck do you care, Strider?”

His voice dripped with sarcasm as always, yet Dave couldn’t help noticing the way his heart warmed at the way Karkat said his name. He pushed himself up, patted the seat beside him. Karkat narrowed his eyes and looked Dave up and down. Sizing him up, like he expected a fight. Dave rolled his eyes. “Oh come on, don’t give me that. We’re fuckin’ stuck here, you said it yourself. You wanna be a sad sack alone, or you wanna complain to someone that’s in the shit with you? I know you don’t have much issue with hollering but I’d rather not scream at you across the room when we could just talk at a normal volume like we’re civilized. I’d assume the others are asleep by now.”

It didn’t take much consideration. Karkat grumbled about it, but he stood, abandoning the book and the coffee, and came to sit next to Dave. His movements were stiff, and he curled his knees up to his chest as he took the spot on the other arm of the couch, tucking himself up tight to avoid all chance of contact. Dave marveled at how petite he was, by comparison; at fifteen, Dave had hit a growth spurt that he knew would have left his pants way too short on his long legs if his outfit weren’t magical god-pajama material. He was long and lanky, and given Bro's large stature, he only expected to get taller. Karkat, though they were roughly the same age, was still a good head shorter, with broad, stocky features. Dave pivoted his body to face the troll, still watching his body language. 

“I can’t sleep either, y’know,” Dave said, when Karkat kept his lips firmly sealed. “I obviously missed out on all the fuckin’ clown murder, so I don’t know what that was like. I mean, I’ve seen my own dipshit corpses a billion times now, it seems, but that’s nothin’. It’s always harder when it’s a friend, and you can’t help ‘em. But even without seein’ it firsthand, this place has a real shitty vibe. It feels…”

“Haunted?” Karkat muttered. 

“Yeah,” Dave agreed, laughing halfheartedly. “That’s probably the best way to put it.”

Karkat nodded, tugging and twisting a lock of his hair. Dave noticed it was getting long, hanging in his eyes; Kanaya would need to cut it soon. “It’s impossible to relax in this fucking place. Even if we had sopor, it wouldn’t help, I don’t think. Not after Gamzee.”

Dave didn’t register that he had reached out until he was already touching Karkat. They each looked equally surprised by the action, and Karkat nearly flinched away, but Dave’s hand on his shoulder was a comfort he hadn’t expected. Once first impact occurred, it was like a dam breaking in slow motion. Dave was babbling, but Karkat didn’t seem to be listening. “Maybe when we get to this new session, it won’t be so bad. Rose said we’ll be able to fix this, and I dunno half the time if I believe what that flighty broad has to say but she seems convinced and I want to believe she’s right. If she is that means it’ll be worth all this, I mean it’s supposed to be some ultimate prize…” 

Wordlessly, Karkat touched Dave’s hand, then uncrumpled his body, leaning close against his shoulder. Dave’s mouth went dry, and he stuttered, hesitating only for a moment before he wrapped his arms around the troll. His little nubby horns butted against Dave’s jaw almost hard enough to hurt, but that was negated as they each realized in unison how nice it felt just to be _held_. It didn’t register how odd it might be, how ‘uncool’ it was for them to show affection to each other when their relationship had been built on a foundation of vague irritation and snarky comebacks. If either had been thinking clearly, or hadn’t been so touch starved or sleep deprived, maybe they would have worried that Rose or Kanaya would see them. 

That had been the first time. After they parted, Karkat had given Dave a long, searching look. He seemed to still be trying to figure him out, to decide if he was trustworthy. He was getting up to leave, to go back to his nest in one of the lab rooms deep in the twisting entrails of the facility. Dave had decided to sleep there on the couch, where he would be able to hear if anything out of the ordinary happen. He always felt the need to be on his toes.

“Are you going to sleep?” Karkat asked.

Dave shook his head. “Probably not.”

“You should.”

“I can’t.”

Again, Karkat watched. When they first met, Dave had learned that a troll’s blood color tinged their skin, much like a human’s would. In certain lights, a soft teal undertone could be seen on Terezi's cheeks, and Kanaya was the same before she was undead. Karkat, however, was considered an anomaly, a mutant, and had spent his whole life taking precautions to hide that from those around him. The grey symbol on his shirt, the grey text color, they were methods of masking and keeping himself safe. He had noticed, up close, that he also painted his face with as neutral a grey makeup as he could find. Asking about it had earned him a lecture about personal privacy and boundaries, and Karkat had stormed off to be alone. 

Afterward, Kanaya explained what life had been like for him on their home planet, where the hemospectrum dictated how a troll lived and died. Karkat's childhood had been spent in constant terror of discovery and culling. Dave felt guilty for asking, but before he could apologize, he noticed Karkat stopped doing it. He had realized that there wasn’t much point in it anymore; there were bigger fish to fry than his blood color, and he didn’t need to waste time hiding it when he no longer had to hide from Imperial Drones. Quickly, Dave noticed how much more alive he looked without it. Anger and embarrassment brought color to his cheeks, and though he wouldn't admit it, it played a part in a lot of Dave's teasing and ribbing afterward. It made him so approachable. 

As they watched each other that night, Karkat’s eyes drooping sleepily, Dave noticed that red flush creep into his cheeks. The tips of his ears reddened in a way that Dave had to hide a smile at the sight of. He knew his and Rose’s did the same when they were embarrassed. “Do you want to come with me?” Karkat asked. He had crossed his arms over his chest and was squeezing himself. Everything in his body language screamed trepidation, and yet his voice was so soft forming those words.

Dave hadn’t spoken. He was afraid a verbal reply would ruin the mood, as he was known to do with his rambling. Instead, he just nodded, stood, and followed Karkat down the hall, past Rose and Kanaya’s room and rows of unoccupied storage closets and corridors to a room as far away from the others as Karkat could get. Dave watched as he busied himself with adjusting his sleep pile. Some of the items in it were comfortable and soft, like pillows and blankets, half-eviscerated dragon plushies, and some old clothes, but there were some things that didn’t make much sense. Some of the clown’s bike horns had made it into the mound, a few books, some old shoes. He didn’t comment, and eventually Karkat was satisfied. He laid down and squirmed and shifted until he was comfortable. He was so tired by then that when he looked back at Dave to tell him to join, he couldn’t even speak. He just grumbled and gave a halfhearted flap of his hand. Dave knelt, laid down, and as he watched Karkat’s eyes roll and flutter under his eyelids, he felt sleep creep up on him, too.

In the present, there was a loud bang downstairs, a shocked yelping shout. Dave and Rose nearly leapt out of their respective skins. 

“What was that?” Dave asked.

Rose shook her head and helped him to his feet. His ankle still hurt, but he didn’t notice in his rush to the door. Rose flung it open as he was acquainting himself with his new crutches.

“John? Jade?”

“We’re fine!” Jade yelled back. “Come check this out!”

Rose grimaced, giving Dave a look still tinged with concern. He shrugged, and the two of them descended the stairs, their conversation effectively suspended until further notice. As they reached the landing, a curious scene came into view. Jade stood in the center of the living room, dressed in a t-shirt and shorts despite the snow falling outside. The room, which they had spent a fair amount of time cleaning the night previous, was a bit of a mess again; things were knocked over, the throw pillows levitating off the couch cushions, and scraps of paper fluttered about, swirling and dancing on a breeze. A breeze that John was making, as he levitated about a foot off the floor. 

“Holy shit,” Dave said. 

John spun around midair, grinning from ear to ear. “Dave! I’m doing it!”

“He’s doing the windy thing!” Jade cried. “And watch this!” She held her arms out, her index fingers and thumbs forming a sort of viewfinder box that she aimed at the couch. Concentrating with one eye closed and her tongue stuck out between her teeth, there was a crackle of energy. The couch shuddered, then shrank to the size of dollhouse furniture. She and John whooped with joy, then Jade concentrated again, and it grew to its original size again, thumping down loudly on the floor. As it did, John cheered, and swooped Jade up into a hug. The two of them floated up too quickly, bonked their heads on the ceiling, and collapsed in a giggling heap on the floor. The moment was so full of pure joy, so overwhelmingly triumphant in contrast to the last few days, Dave wished he could just freeze it, make it never stop.

Without realizing it, he did just that.

He felt the familiar pull in his gut, the energy of time flowing through him, and the intensity of it made him squeeze his eyes shut and press his hands to the sides of his head. Over the rushing in his ears, Dave didn’t notice at first that the room had been plunged into silence. When his eyes blinked open again, the scene was, indeed, frozen. John and Jade lay motionless on the living room floor, flat on their backs. Their hands clutched at their stomachs, mouths still wide and joyous with laughter. Rose had approached and stood watching them fondly a few feet away. The swirl of papers and debris that John’s wind powers had kicked up were suspended midair, the closest just a few inches from Dave’s face. He reached out and tapped it, and it floated away lazily like an astronaut in zero gravity. An idea formed in his head, and he grinned. 

Taking his sweet time, Dave limped over to the kitchen. As he had hoped, there was still cake in the fridge from the birthday party. He retrieved a plate from the cabinet and began performing surgery on the top tier, carefully sliding it onto the plate. For good measure, he reached back into the fridge and retrieved a can of whipped cream and coated the top of the cake in a good layer. It was a mess, but it would get the job done. If it were Mr. Egbert, it would have been a very court-jester-esque cream pie. This would be better, if a bitch to clean up after. 

Satisfied, Dave hobbled back into the living room with his confectionery monstrosity. Concentrating hard, he held it over John, making sure it was suspended in the perfect place in time and space: right above John’s head. He stepped back and grinned at it. John would never know what hit him. Dave looked around the room, considering what else he could get away with. Jade, he decided, was already going to get hit with the fallout, so he would leave her alone. Rose, though? She was in the safe zone, and that just wasn’t acceptable. He decided to gather up the remaining harlequin statues that hadn’t been broken in her grimdark moment yesterday and arranged them lovingly in a circle around her. Then, for good measure, he took her hand, made her hold it out, and placed the smallest clown he could find in her upturned palm. Its creepy little face was directly eye-level with her. _Perfect._

His masterpiece finally prepared, Dave sat down on the sofa, assumed a casual, lounging pose, took one last look around, and snapped his fingers. Time restarted, and the chain reaction was triggered; John and Jade’s wheezing laughter returned almost as quickly as it was replaced by shrieks of shock at the cake splatting down on John’s face, sending globs of frosting and whipped cream splattering wetly across the floor and all over Jade. Rose screamed, and Dave had to use all his willpower not to laugh as he heard the harlequin in her hand hit the wood floor and explode. There was a moment of confusion as John sputtered and spat, smearing the chocolatey mess in his efforts to get the cake out of his eyes. When he could see again, all three heads turned to Dave. He grinned wickedly. 

“You bastard!” John shrieked, but he was still laughing. They all were, as John used his wind powers to blow all the cake off himself. It splattered all over the room, and Dave would have complained about how much of a mess they were going to have to clean up if John and Jade hadn’t already pounced on him, knocking the air out of him in one muffled _OOF_ as they dragged him off the couch cushions and crushed him in a hug. Rose, not much of a hugger herself, leaned over the back of the sofa and smirked at him.

“Welcome back, knight of time.”

****

That night, John and Rose busied themselves in the kitchen with dinner. It was cold outside, but Jade wanted to get in some target practice, so Dave had done his best to help her set up some old cans and assorted junk they found lying around. The neighbors apparently wouldn’t have much to say about the gunshots anymore; during their walk around the neighborhood that morning, the three of them had discovered that there did not seem to be any signs of life but them in the area. Jade said it was likely that before long, underlings would make their way in again, but after the defeat of their pseudo-guardians, the horde likely needed time to regroup before they attacked. They planned to find a way out before then. 

Dave lounged in one of the lawn chairs on the back porch with his camera, watching Jade expertly pick off soda cans and wine bottles with her rifle. As she did so, Dave practiced his time magic, focusing on the bullets and stopping them mid-flight before letting them go on their merry way to their destination again. A few times, he froze Jade and snapped a picture of her. She was a beautiful girl, a radiant subject, and he couldn’t resist when she stuck her tongue out in concentration or getting a silly one of her face scrunched up that they could tease each other about later. It made him long for the days when they would exchange drawings and remixes when they were kids. Things were simpler back then, if lonelier. The activities themselves were entertaining, though mostly he was enjoying Jade’s company. She talked away about anything and everything, her memories of the game, her work out on her island, her grandpa. Dave was secretly thankful that the game hadn’t tried to resurrect him. Even a copy of that man would have been a force to be reckoned with. Plus, he couldn’t bear to see Jade kill her own guardian again.

“I can’t wait to see what it’s like out there,” she said, grinning at Dave as a wine bottle exploded into glittering slivers. Dave froze time, snapped a shot of Jade and the bottle, her hair blowing in the wind dramatically. He let her go, and she stuck her tongue out at him at the sight of his raised camera. He snapped that shot, too.

“I bet it’s gonna be so beautiful! If it's anything like some of the dream bubbles were. Or our planets,” she went on, returning her rifle to her sylladex with a flourish and plopping down in the chair next to Dave. She was close, maybe too close for comfort with anyone else, but Dave didn’t mind. It was Jade, and she was safe. “We’ll all be together, and we’ll get to meet up with our friends all over again!”

Dave gave her a small smile and a hum of agreement. Jade scooted her chair closer and wiggled under the blanket Dave had brought with him, coming to rest with her head on his shoulder. “I guess so,” he said. “but…fuck, Harley, aren’t you just a little bit nervous at least?”

She grinned up at him. “Are you?”

Dave scowled. “Well, fuck, Jade, as much as I hate to bust your bubble, I think we’ve all learned over the years that I’m not as cool and smooth as y’all were originally led to believe. It’s a bit nervewracking for my entire world to get flip-turned upside down again.”

Jade rolled her eyes. “We all know you aren’t the fresh prince of anything, Dave. It’s going to be okay, when we get there it’s all gonna come back to us!”

“But what if it doesn’t?”

Jade paused, chewing her lip thoughtfully. “You’re worried about Karkat again, huh?”

Dave huffed. “Does fuckin’ everyone know about me pining over his shouty ass?”

She giggled. “Yeah, pretty much. We were all friends, y’know? Besides, Rose was talking to us about it this morning. Before you get defensive,” she cut him off as he opened his mouth to do just that. “She meant well. We were discussing the meteor years. You remember where me and John went for all that time, don’t you?”

The image of a glossy golden battleship came to mind, hurtling through space. “Yeah, I guess so.”

Jade smiled, but she looked sad. “I won’t give you all the boring details, but… all I’ll say is I know a thing or two about pining for someone.”

Before Dave could respond, John stepped out into the yard wearing an apron. “Hey guys, dinner is ready!” he raised an eyebrow at the sight of the two of them snuggled under a blanket. “Jeez, you know if you were cold, you could have come inside, right?”

“This coming from someone who told us to ‘take your horseshit outside’ not two hours ago!” Jade teased. John stuck his tongue out at her, and Jade returned the gesture. 

“Whatever! Just come in, the food’s getting cold.”

He disappeared back into the house, and Jade turned back to Dave. He was still looking at the space where John had stood. “Or, y’know…multiple someones.”

He blinked in surprise, looking back at Jade. Her eyes were impossibly green, glittering with mischief. “What—I don’t—”

“Dave,” she cut him off, getting to her feet and helping him do the same. Her hands were warm and strong in his grasp, and she squeezed his gently. “Listen. Anyone with eyes can see the way you look at him. I realize that you’re probably having trouble coming to terms with your sexuality already, and now all this stuff with Karkat and the game, but like…maybe it’s time to just relax a little and let your heart do the talking?”

Dave stared at her, mouth half-opening and closing over and over as he tried to process. “I…I don’t think I know how to do that, Jade.”

She laughed. “I know. You never have, not in any universe. Just…try, okay? John, he cares about you so much. I know neither of you want to admit how complex your feelings are for each other, and it can be weird to fall for a friend. There’s a lot at stake, I mean, he’s been your best friend for so many years now. But that doesn’t mean that you should put your feelings in a box just because you’re scared,” she pulled Dave into a tight hug, her muscular arms squeezing the breath from his lungs. Dave hugged her back and buried his face in her shoulder. “And I know that the Karkat thing is hard to grasp, too, but it’s okay. You just need to be honest with yourselves. I think if he were here now, he would tell you the same thing. As much of a grumpy bastard as he is, he’s a romantic at heart.”

They parted, and Jade gave Dave a bright grin. He managed a wobbly smile in return. Jade handed him his crutch and put an arm around his waist to help him into the house. It smelled amazing inside, and Dave’s mouth watered. He realized that John had made his favorite meal, a pasta dish that they had eaten at least once a week at their house with a sauce that Dave would probably drink if he got the chance. When they walked into the kitchen to wash up, John was plating the food at the counter. He turned and grinned at them. 

“I hope you’re hungry!” he said warmly. 

Dave’s stomach flip-flopped. _Why can’t shit just be easy for once?_

That night, John’s peaceful, sleeping face was the last thing he saw when he drifted off. When he opened his eyes in his dream, Karkat was there instead. They were lying in the pillow pile, his eyes glowing in the dark.

“When are you coming back, Dave?” he whispered. 

“I don’t know,” Dave whispered back. “I don’t know, I’m sorry.”

His face warped and faded, and Dave tried to reach out to touch him.

“Don’t forget me again, asshole.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please forgive any errors in this, i swear i have been looking at it for so long i just cant focus on it anymore LOL
> 
> I am excited to get to my plans in the next couple chapters :-) picture me rubbing my evil lil hands together
> 
> see you next time!! kisses!!


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi y'all!
> 
> been a long time! Like i said in my last note i ran out of steam on this one in a big way. i thought a long break would do me some good, and now that ive thought about it and figured some things out, i think i have the rest of the story plotted out and i'm having a good time writing it again. Anyway, i hope you enjoy!

John was still in bed the next morning, and Dave was shocked to see him propped on one elbow looking down at him when he woke. 

“Jesus, Egbert,” he grumbled, rubbing his face. “the fuck are you lookin’ at me like that for, it’s creepy.”

“You were talking in your sleep,” he replied. “What am I supposed to do, not be nosy?”

Dave scowled at him. “Common courtesy says yes.”

John laughed. “Since when have I ever been courteous?”

“Fair point,” Dave admitted with a yawn. “What was I saying?”

John was quiet. Dave raised an eyebrow at him. “What, John?”

“You were talking to Karkat, I think.”

Dave remembered his dream, vaguely. He hadn’t slept well, but he could recall bits and pieces. A lot of it, he guessed, was memories, but it was so hard to tell. Nights on the meteor, visions of dead Daves. His brain kept circling back to Karkat, his face fading and changing each time. He frowned at the memory. “Yeah, I guess I was.”

He was quiet again. Dave knew the past few days that he had been avoiding the subject of their feelings, and he had been alright with that. There had been other, far more pressing issues. Besides, feelings were hard, and he wasn’t in much of a mood to deal with them. Now, though, looking up at John, he felt a pang of regret. He pushed himself up, scooting back to sit with his back to the headboard. John looked up at him.

“We need to talk, John.”

John frowned. “About what?”

“You know what about, dude, come on,” Dave sighed and ran a hand through his hair. He could feel it sticking up at weird angles. “The fucking elephant in the room is so big it’s suffocating us. And its shitting everywhere and making a hell of a mess so lets just go ahead and…air it out?” 

John rolled his eyes, but he laughed. He mirrored Dave’s posture and sat back, his hands folded in his lap. “Okay. Well. You brought it up, so you go first.”

Despite his gung-ho attitude, Dave had to stop and think. His hands fiddled anxiously with the blanket. _Don’t fuck this up, Strider._ “Okay. So. Um,” _Great. Off to a great start, dumbass._ “Here’s the thing, John. I realize we are all super confused and there’s a lot of other shit for us to worry about right now, but I think it’s pretty goddamn ignorant for you and I to pretend like there isn’t something going on here. Feelings-wise.”

John’s smile faltered. “Feelings-wise.”

“Yes, feelings-wise. Look,” he turned to face John and, before he could chicken out, he took his hand. John’s eyebrows climbed up his forehead, but he didn’t pull away. His eyes were so bright and blue that Dave almost lost his nerve, but he kept talking. “John, you and I have known each other a long time. We’ve been friends for so fucking long I can’t remember a time when you weren’t in my life, and the closer we get to getting out of this place, the farther away you feel. Now I realize I ain’t exactly the warmest person on earth and that’s my bad, but I care a lot and I think it’d be pretty fuckin’ stupid of me to let you think that I don’t. And maybe we made it weirder and more complicated than it needed to be, maybe I fucked up kissing you, but you kissed me back and—” 

“Dave,” John stopped him. For once, Dave couldn’t read the expression on his face. “You didn’t fuck up.”

“Then why are we avoiding this?”

John sighed, frustrated. “Because I know you were in love with someone else before we got stuck here, and everything we do is leading up to you going back to him?”

Dave bit his lip. He was right that going back was bringing up complicated feelings, sure. He barely remembered Karkat even now, but every thought of him made Dave’s stomach curl and tighten with longing. He wondered often where he was now, what he was doing. If he was safe. “John, do you seriously still think that getting out of here is going to negate everything that we’ve done? Do you think once we find that door, I’m just going to forget all about living with you and sleeping next to you and—”

“Yes, Dave, I do think that, whether it's up to you or not. That’s exactly what happened when we got here the first time, isn’t it? You just…you just forgot. We all did, and,” John snapped his mouth shut, clenching his teeth. Dave could see tears in his eyes and reached up to cup his cheek. John leaned into it, but his face twisted with pain. “I don’t want to forget.”

“We won’t.”

“You don’t know that!” He snapped. “What if we go through that door and we’re back to square one again? Or worse, what if this time we get separated completely? We don’t have a clue what we’re up against anymore. What if there’s some other stupid glitch and it wipes us out of each other’s memories entirely?”

Dave pondered that. He had a point, but the longer they spent here, the more it felt like the game was in its dying throes. The enemies he remembered hadn’t been around, no imps or ogres or Jack Noir. The entire place, thinking back, was starting to feel like purgatory, a half-truth. Like a dream, where all your brain can do is cycle through your memories to create a stage for the story to play out on. No new faces, places, concepts. 

“I don’t think that’s going to happen,” he said softly. “I don’t think I can ever forget you, no matter what.”

John didn’t answer. For a while, they just sat together, knees touching, John leaning into Dave’s hand like it was a lifeline. He looked like he was in physical pain, and it was doing things to Dave’s heart that he didn’t understand or know what to do with. When he had watched for what felt like an eternity, he finally couldn’t take it anymore. “John,” he whispered, paused to lick his lips when his voice trembled. “You know I love you, don’t you?”

His eyes squeezed shut tight, like he was bracing to be hit, and he drew in a shaky breath. “Don’t, Dave.”

“But I do,” he said, feeling almost desperate. “I do, that’s not just going to fucking stop. I know that I’m the fucking crown prince of avoidant dickheads but all these years together I have been denying to myself how I really feel. I’ve been in love with you for way fucking longer than I ever realized until all this shit started happening and Karkat or not, I—I don’t know what I would ever do without you dude, I just can’t—” 

“Dave, shut _up_.”

“No, John, goddammit this is serious, we need to talk about—"

John surged forward then, taking a fistful of Dave’s shirt in his hand and yanking him forward to mash their mouths together in a way that Dave knew was mostly to shut him up. Outside, a timely thunderclap rattled the glass in the windowpanes, but fear of storms be damned, Dave didn’t notice. John was feverish in his kisses, and Dave’s hands reached up to curl in his hair, pull him in closer. John’s glasses got knocked askew and he threw them across the room carelessly. 

Eventually, John broke away first, his lips parted as he stared at Dave in almost awe. Dave felt awkward suddenly, hyper-aware that he had never put his shades on and his eyes were wide and full of emotion. He opened his mouth to talk and promptly snapped it shut as a cacophonous roll of thunder shook the house. He grit his teeth and tried not to look as scared as he felt. If John noticed, he had the good graces not to say anything about it. Dave wondered, as his best friend’s fingers traced along his jaw almost disbelievingly, if he was the reason for the storm brewing outside the house. He did have his windy powers back now, and if Dave was thinking about it, he seemed to recall the weather always sort of reflecting John’s mood. Once, when he had a particularly awful day, there was a hailstorm so intense that it had shattered one of John’s bedroom windows. Dave remembered the aftermath, watching John stand in his room assessing the damage and staring at the glass strewn across the floor like it meant something to him. Perhaps it had.

“Dave,” he said, and Dave snapped out of his daze. John’s lips looked a little swollen. “You’re staring.”

“Sorry,” he mumbled, his face going red. 

John seemed to come to his senses in stages. He let go of Dave, then looked away. He busied himself with using his wind powers to bring his glasses to him as he stood and started to pace the room, placing them back on the bridge of his nose. Dave watched helplessly, unsure what to say. The rain battered the windowpanes harder and harder, and out the streaked, wet glass Dave could see the trees swaying and churning aggressively.

“Dave,” John started again, and Dave snapped his attention back to where he was pacing. “It’s not that I don’t lo—care about you. I do. You know that. But can you not see how hard this is for me?”

“I can,” he said weakly, his heart sinking at the correction. “I know.”

“I mean, fuck!” he exclaimed, making a broad gesture with his hands. The wind rapped a tree limb against the window, and Dave flinched. John was too busy spiraling to notice. “Maybe before this would have made sense, I mean, Dad asked me like twice a week if you and I were in a relationship, and fuck if I knew what to tell him. But I guess it doesn’t matter anyway, it’s not like it was…it’s not like that was really him.”

“He did?”

“I thought maybe, I dunno, after some unspecified amount of time, we would figure our shit out and it would be…something! I don’t know! I mean, either we would bite the bullet and be open with each other or we would see other people,” he stopped and ran his hands through his hair, looking like he wanted to pull it out. “Maybe I was wrong to think that. I guess it was easy to get into the domestic headspace with the way shit was, but that wasn’t…”

It wasn’t real. It had never been real, and they both knew that. Dave looked out the window again, as a bolt of lightning cracked the sky. The power in the house flickered. It seemed to get John’s attention.

“Uh, is that me?” he asked.

“I think so,” Dave mumbled.

“Oh fuck,” he said quietly, taking a long, deep breath. He let it out through his nose, then drew in another. As he calmed his breathing, the rain slackened, but the clouds were still thick and looming above the Egbert house. Eventually, the drops were a dull patter, and he stood in the middle of the bedroom, looking lost and bedraggled.

“It wasn’t real,” he said miserably. “The house, our lives. None of that was real.”

“I guess not,” Dave said. “The house, yeah. But we…You and me, we’re real, aren’t we? What the fuck does the setting have to do with our feelings for each other?”

John stared at him, his own eyes searching Dave’s for something Dave didn’t know how to provide. After a long moment, he turned toward the door. “I need…I dunno. Fuck. Tell Rose and Jade I’ll be back later.”

“Where are you going?”

“Gonna look for the door.”

Dave sighed. “John, it is piss pouring rain.”

He didn’t reply, just shrugged as he slipped out the door. Dave was alone again, and more confused than ever. 

“So much for clearing shit up.”

****

It was summer, and summer meant relaxation, as far as John Egbert was concerned. 

Even after finishing school, John had held onto the childlike belief that summertime was break time, and he had tried to push that principle off on Dave. Dave, ironically enough, was sort of a tightass when it came to work. He pushed himself constantly, spending the time he wasn’t traveling either editing his work or taking on countless little personal projects. He truly loved what he did, and John thought it was sweet most of the time. He had known Dave as a goofy, repressed kid, trying too hard to be cool, and then as a repressed adult that sucked at coping with his problems. When he had started achieving some degree of success and recognition, it started to consume him, and he would sit in front of his computer fiddling with lighting and color balance of a single shot until he gave himself a migraine and wound up lying on the floor in the dark with a bag of frozen peas pressed to his eyes. That was when John took it on himself to step in, pull him out of his own head, and get him outside. 

The garden had been a blessing for them both. Dave, having lived in a tiny apartment dead center of a city all his life, was not the most outdoorsy type. He had spent any time outside almost exclusively on his roof, strifing with his brother. Watching him the first time he had come to Washington had made not laughing at Dave a challenge; he seemed shocked at the very sight of trees and grass. He was so out of his depth in the suburbs that the first night he was at the Egbert household, John had woken up in the middle of the night to find him wide awake, staring out the window. 

“What’s wrong?”

“Too quiet.”

The first time they had stood together on the banks of the lake, John and Jade were quick to run into the water together, whooping, laughing, and splashing each other. Dave had hung back awkwardly as even Rose waded in up to her knees, watching him curiously. They were all shocked to learn that he couldn’t swim, nor had he ever really had the chance to try and learn.

Over the years, on road trips and visits to Washington, he grew more used to it. Jade loved teaching her friends about foraging and wild living. She had a habit of bringing a tent with her wherever she went, and on their sixteenth birthday trip, she had pitched it for them on the lakeshore, where they all slept piled together in sleeping bags, listening to the waves lap against the rocks. Dave learned that he liked sleeping outside, being able to see the stars. 

“We don’t get to see ‘em much in Houston,” he explained, staring straight up as the four of them sat around their campfire. “Too much light pollution.” 

When John bought the house, Jade gleefully told him that she wanted to get him a housewarming gift. John had not had to think about it long before he asked her to help him set up the garden. Initially, Dave had been standoffish. He had watched intermittently from the back porch as Jade and John built the wooden boxes for raised beds, filled them with soil, set up trellises and sprinkler systems. Over time, he offered to help, and John grinned as he watched Jade show him how to plant things and care for them. He sneaked a few photos on his phone of Dave wearing a sunhat and gardening gloves, watching and listening intently as Jade talked. When Dave came in after his first full day working in the garden, John had wheezed with laughter to discover that he had a hellacious sunglasses tan line. The photo he had snapped before Dave could stop him was his phone wallpaper for months. 

The first summer they had the garden, it was all they talked about. John was shocked at how much Dave cared for it; one morning, he walked into the kitchen as the sun was just peeking over the horizon, and was shocked to find Dave already there, nursing a cup of coffee. He was poring over a book with his shades resting in his hair, the end of a highlighter pressed to his lips, totally focused until John walked in.

“Uh, what are you doing awake before noon? Did hell freeze over?”

Dave’s head jerked up, and he blinked. “Nah,” he said, highlighting something and then closing the book with the marker as a bookmark. “Just doing some fuckin’ green bean research, bro. Wanna make sure our lil’ sprouts have a chance to grow up strong. No sprout left behind in this patch. They’re gonna be some grade-A legumes. Ivy league colleges are gonna be throwing down for a chance to get at these little bastards. We’re gonna be the first plant dads to send our veggies to Harvard.”

“Mind if I join you?” John asked, sitting down across from him with his own coffee.

“Be my guest.”

It was incredibly sweet, John thought. He watched as Dave reopened the book, nibbling the end of his pen, highlighting the occasional passage. Some, he read aloud, making jokes about their “absolutely prodigious produce” here and there. But when he was quiet, focused on his research, that was when John couldn’t take his eyes away. He watched the way the sunlight filtering through the window caught on the strands of Dave’s hair, his lashes. He noticed the way Dave’s hand tucked into the handle of his mug, one finger curled around the spoon he always left in the cup after stirring in too much cream and sugar as he lifted the ceramic to his lips. He didn’t realize how long he’d been staring until Dave’s eyes lifted from the page, almost coyly, and smiled at him.

He noticed the way his heart thumped against his ribs as he smiled back, and realized that he might have a bit of a problem. He might have more than a bit of a crush.

****

“Harley, what exactly are we supposed to be doing here?”

“Be patient! You’ll pick it up in no time, I promise!”

After John had stormed out of the house that morning, Jade and Rose waited a courteous length of time before calling him to breakfast as a buffer, so that it seemed less like they had heard everything. Dave knew they had, but he didn’t mind, not really. Jade wrapped him in a rib-crushing hug when he finally came downstairs, and Rose gave him an extra slice of bacon without making him argue with her for it. They did most of the talking, glossing over John’s absence as they discussed plans for the day.

“So,” Jade began, a twinkle in her eye. “I think there is something we need to do before moving forward that will be a big help to you in particular, Dave.”

“What’s that, Harls?” he asked, pushing his eggs around his plate disinterestedly. 

“Well,” she grinned at him, so hard her face looked like it might crack. “John and I aren’t the only ones who can fly, y’know.”

That was how they found themselves in the living room of the Egbert household, a mess of pillows strewn about on the floor just in case. Rose seemed calm, but Dave was quite nervous. He had never had a fear of heights before, not after a childhood spent on the rooftop of a high rise, fighting for dear life, but something about flying was intense. He couldn’t tell how much of his nausea was from overexcitement and how much was from dread.

“So the key is this: close your eyes,” Jade instructed. Rose did, and took a deep breath. Dave scowled back at her. “Dave, I see you! Close them!”

“Harley, c’mon, what is this, church camp? I gotta close my eyes so Jesus can creep in and work his bible magic? No thanks, I wanna see what’s about to happen to me.”

Jade frowned at him, her eyebrows pinching together in irritation. “Dave, I don’t even know what to say to that.”

“Sorry, you mean to tell me you never had bible school on deathmurder island?”

“You mean to tell us your brother made you go to bible school?” Rose laughed, snorting softly behind her hand. 

“Fuck off, Lalonde,” he snapped back. “It was either that or spend all summer cooped up in the house with him. Thought it’d be a regular hoot and a holler, doing macaroni art, learning the good word--”

“Hey!” Jade’s voice was like a bark, and both Rose and Dave snapped to attention again. “Look, I know you two just loooove being nitpicky with each other, but I’m running the show here today!”

“Yes ma’am,” Dave grumbled. Rose elbowed him in the arm.

“Eyes closed!” They both obeyed. “Now, focus on your body. Start with your chest, your breath. Feel it?”

As Dave did as instructed, he found himself thinking about John again. A pang of guilty longing struck his heart, but he pushed it away as quickly as it came. Focus. There could be time for that later. He drew in a deep breath, held it, released it slowly. He could remember his therapist telling him to do something similar. The memory felt eons old.

“Okay! Now, spread your awareness out! Let yourself feel your arms, your legs. Got that?”

“Yeah,” Dave and Rose agreed in unison. They each cracked an eye open long enough to smirk at each other. If Jade saw, she ignored it.

“Now, this is the tricky part: Focus on the idea of weightlessness.”

“The fuck is this, Jade, a yoga class?”

Smugly, Jade replied, “Dave, if you would spend less time running your mouth, you would be floating already. Like Rose.”

“Aw, what?” He opened his eyes, and sure enough, Rose was already floating a solid foot and a half off the ground, giving him the snarkiest of smiles. His ears turned red at the embarrassment of being shown up. How dare she one-up him like this? “Alright, alright, fine. Weightless. Cool. I can do that. Cool. Easy.”

“Quietly. Focus.”

“Ugh.”

Dave closed his eyes again, concentrating hard. He could feel his arms, heavy at his sides. His fingertips, his thighs, calves, toes. He thought about the feeling of a plane taking off, the way his stomach would lurch a little as the landing gear lifted off the runway. He thought about the way it felt to stare out the window at the clouds below. He thought about his dreams, so far away, of John flying over the battlefield. He didn’t know anymore if it was a memory, or if his brain had patchworked together so many different aspects of the game that he just thought it was, but it felt more real the more he dwelt on it, the way John gripped him.

_”I’ve got you!”_

“Hey, see, that wasn’t so hard!”

He opened his eyes, and he was eye level with Rose again. He grinned. 

“That certainly took you long enough, Strider.”

“Well, you do have the advantage, Rosie, being a flighty broad and all.” She smacked him on the back of the head, but they all got a good laugh out of it. It felt good to laugh.

After flying lessons, Dave was free of the burden of his crutches. His ankle was still bruised an ugly purply green, but no weight on it meant no pain, and he contentedly floated around the house, helping the girls wherever they needed him. Jade suggested sparring practice, and Dave reluctantly drew his sword. Nerves made his hands tremble and sweat around the leather-wrapped grip of the hilt, but as he fell into rhythm with Rose, deftly dodging strikes from her new knitting needles, he found himself enjoying it. She was quick as a whip, and as they whirled around each other, Dave felt muscle memory take over. He remembered how well they had fought together in the past, how evenly matched in speed they were. It was less like training for battle, and more like dancing with an old friend.

John didn’t return until late that evening, when the sun was setting behind the rows of cookie-cutter houses. He stepped into the house with snowflakes in his hair and clinging to his shoulders. Dave was lounging on the couch when he entered, ankle wrapped in ice packs. The awkward silence between them was heavy, and Dave was silently grateful and irritated that Rose and Jade were busy in the study and kitchen, respectively.

“How’s it feel?” John asked after a too-long pause. They had both been staring, unsure how to proceed. 

“Better,” Dave admitted. “Jade helped us get our pilot’s licenses back today.”

John gave him a little smile, warm, but more restrained than he was apt to do normally. He looked so tired. "Nice," he said, then turned and headed for the kitchen. Dave watched him go with bated breath. 

This is now how this was supposed to go at all. This was not the way he saw their relationship turning, and he prayed that things would go back to normal soon. He could hear John and Jade fall into easy conversation in the kitchen, laughing comfortably with each other, and he couldn’t help but feel left out. 

Dinner wasn’t as awkward as he worried it would be. It was nice, the four of them all around the table, chatting amicably over Jade’s cooking. She was the best of the lot of them when it came to the culinary arts, even John, so it was a treat when it was her turn. John was clearly avoiding directly talking to him, but he wasn’t malicious about it. He smiled and laughed along when Dave and Jade playfully ribbed each other, or when he and Rose started one of their famous one-up snark-offs, but the rift was felt all the same. Dave felt like he was being kept at arm's length, when all he wanted was to be held.

“He needs time, you know,” Rose told him later, when John and Jade were busy having a snowball fight after dinner. The two of them were watching through the window from the dining table, and Dave didn’t realize he was staring until she spoke.

“I know,” he admitted, looking at the table. “It just sucks. I wish he wouldn’t shut me out.”

“Funny to hear that sentiment coming from you.”

“Yeah, bite me.”

“Creative, Strider. Your fountain of unending quips and jabs seems to be running dry. Perhaps you should get your pump system inspected?”

“Probably the filter, too,” he agreed, smirking at her. Her smile was coy, but he could see the sympathy in her violet gaze. “Ain’t a drop coming out of the weird little pissing cherubs these days. The entire botanical garden is just lifeless without their creepy streams.”

“Indeed. Maybe—”

Suddenly, there was a horrible sound, a cracking like the world was tearing apart above their heads. The night sky was boiling and swirling. Dave heard Jade yelp, and both of them leapt to their feet, weapons drawn. Outside the window, an arc of lightning snapped across the horizon dramatically. Dave could see John’s shocked expression illuminated in the glow, and he knew that this time, this was not his doing.

The two of them rushed outside to meet Jade and John, ignoring the bitter cold slashing across exposed skin. Snowflakes danced wildly on the wind, howling so loudly now Dave felt his eardrums might burst.

“What the fuck is going on?” He shouted. 

“No clue,” John replied. His warhammer was in his hand again. “Look!”

The sky was a sickening greeny-grey, clouds forming a vortex above the front yard of John’s house. Dave’s stomach lurched. _This is it_ , he thought. _This is the hoarde, back again. The game will never let us rest for long. It’s time to fight again._ Maybe it would be Jack and, outnumbered once again by an omnipotent hellbeast with nowhere to hide, this would be the end. He brandished his sword as lightning struck again. John used his wind powers to form a bubble around them, the snowflakes bouncing and ricocheting uselessly off of the forcefield as he did, and the four of them assumed fighting stances, ready to attack. The cloud cover spiraled tighter and tighter, until suddenly, with a great flash of light, the tension popped. Dave nearly dropped his sword at the sound, like a great bubble bursting. The energy reverberated through them, rustling the trees and rattling windows all around. The shift in pressure made him want to vomit, but he held his ground.

When the light dimmed, all was still, and then—

“Oh my god,” Jade breathed. 

Rose was already running.

When Dave’s eyes focused again, this is what he saw.

In the middle of the street, there were several new figures, all varying degrees of disoriented. The first was a tall, musclebound man, dark curls jutting out at all angles from his head and a pair of thick, square glasses askew on his nose. Beside him was a petite, plump woman with a wispy black pixie cut and wire-rimmed oval spectacles equally as crooked, desperately hanging onto the man’s elbow. Her pale complexion was beaded with sweat, like she was mere moments from passing out on the spot. On her other arm was a tall blonde, a cloud of curls framing her face. She looked concerned as she helped support the other girl, talking soothingly to her. Bringing up the end of their daisy chain was another man, doubled over at the waist. He had hair the same white-gold shade as Dave’s own, spiked in a dramatic, if disheveled, anime style that matched his sunglasses. They all looked a bit seasick, but he was clutching at his stomach, dry-heaving. _Not cool, bro._

Off to their right, there were three more figures, humanoid, but very different in appearance: trolls. One was a tall, statuesque figure, with two long, curving horns jutting proudly from her scalp. One was pointed, the other barbed like a fishhook. She had recovered the quickest and was standing with her arms outstretched as Rose ran to embrace her. Behind her, the final two of their party remained. Another woman, not as tall as the first, with conical, pointed horns and a pair of red-lensed sunglasses perched on the bridge of her wide nose, and a man, leaning heavily into her shoulder. His hair curled wildly around small, blunted horns, and where he was grimacing, a neat row of pointed teeth were visible.

It was him that Dave stared at, dumbfounded, his heart hammering in his chest cavity. Him, who looked up as Rose collided hard with the first troll, weeping with joy as she was lifted off the ground and spun. Him, whose eyes widened with recognition, his face going slack.

“Dave?”

He pinched his arm, hard, and cursed at the pain. _Definitely awake._

Karkat Vantas was standing before him, in the flesh. Older, taller, broader, but Karkat. His eyes glowed red in the dark, burning intensely through Dave’s shades, and Dave knew it was really him. Not a game clone, not a copy. It was _him_.

Rose was sobbing, Kanaya clutching and rocking her like she never intended to let go. Jade busied herself with the humans, helping them get their bearings and asking the dark-haired fellow a million questions, which he answered excitedly and returned with queries of his own. 

John was rigid beside him, his hammer lowered, eyes fixed on the ground.

“Dave.”

The voice came again, and Dave looked at him. Karkat was approaching, an arm outstretched. John was watching, now; he could feel his blue eyes on his face.

“Do you remember me?”

He didn’t know how to answer that. He felt a million things at once; he wanted what Rose had, that soul-crushing hug that Karkat’s strong arms would clearly be able to wring all his pain out with like a tube of toothpaste. He wanted to go to John, to hold his hand and tell him everything was okay. He wanted to rush to Dirk's side and help him up, hug him hard until he was sure he was still alive and whole. 

In the end, though, he did none of those things. Panic welled in his gut, constricting his lungs, and he was too overwhelmed with the anxiety to focus or take action. He froze, eyes darting back and forth from John to Karkat, mouth opening and closing helplessly. 

“Uh,” he said finally. Karkat looked hopeful. John looked pained. “I, uh. I need a minute.” 

As he lifted off the ground and rocketed into the sky, he wished he had had the foresight to grab one of John’s sweaters. 

****

The night was frigid, and it was not long before he was shaking in the bitter wind. He had taken a few laps around the neighborhood, gliding slowly over rooftops near identical to John’s. The moon was high, about half-full, the light dancing on the waves of the lake as he drifted past. Even far removed from the situation, his thoughts were racing; what the hell was he going to say when he came back? What the hell was being said in his absence? The longer he thought about it, the tighter his gut twisted, and the farther he flew from home.

A particularly icy gust of wind cut through him, and Dave hissed. “Fuck,” he huffed, wrapping his arms around himself. He wore only a long-sleeved shirt, jeans, and socks. Not at all an adequate outfit for the great outdoors of a Washington winter, even a fake one, and definitely not enough for a person, god or not, to be floating this high in the atmosphere. He rapidly surveyed the ground below him, looking for a place to land, and was surprised to see something he hadn’t noticed yet: a water tower. _That’ll work._

The landings were still the hardest part, Dave mused, as he awkwardly touched down on the catwalk around the water tank and stumbled. It was still cold, and he slipped a little on the icy metal, but he was able to huddle up on one side and use the tank’s bulk as a windbreaker for himself. The calm suburb sprawled out below him was a quaint scene, picturesque, like something you would see on a postcard. In his head, he could see the layout; a welcoming, cheery font, _Greetings from Maple Valley!_ beside the winking blanket of stars and the moon. As he imagined it, he was reminded of the gravity of the situation, and his chest tightened with emotion.

_None of this is real._

High above John’s childhood home, Dave Strider let himself cry.

It wasn’t the most dramatic of expressions of emotion, and it didn’t last long, but it was all he could manage in his exhausted state. He felt torn; he thought about Karkat, about how desperately he wanted to talk to him. How the hell had they gotten there? Where had he been for all those years? Was he alright? There was so much he wanted to know, and he finally had the chance. But how could he, when things were still so twisted? When things were so dire, how could he possibly give a shit about interpersonal relationships?

_Just talk to them, dumbass. You won’t get anywhere if you don’t._

Eventually, the cold was too much. He sniffled and composed himself as best he could, wiping the wetness from his cheeks as he stood again. His hands rested on the cold rail as he gazed out over the town one last time, then, with a deep, grounding breath, he launched into the air again, meandering back toward the Egbert household. It was eerily dark down below, not a single light on in the houses lining the empty streets. He took his time getting back, floating almost aimlessly through the night sky, when suddenly, he noticed a glow. A glow in the opposite direction of John’s house.

His heart raced as he stopped, hovering in midair. The light was softly pulsing, bluish-white, just over the horizon. With a twinge of pain behind his eye, a memory burst into his mind; the door, the one to the ultimate reward, with its glowing handle, and John’s hand reaching out for it.

The way out.

He flew back home as fast as he could, thoughts racing as the wind burned his cheeks. He followed the warm glow of the porch light, heartbeat thundering harder and harder as he watched it grow larger. He landed awkwardly in the yard, tumbling to his knees in the snow when the pain rocketed up his wounded leg. He cursed and hissed, trying to regain his bearings and stand up, but his extremities were going numb from the cold. He took a moment just to catch his breath, on his hands and knees on the ground.

“Dave?”

He looked up. Dirk was standing on the balcony, looking down at him in surprise. Dave, panting, stared back. “Hey,” he said weakly.

“Are you alright?” he asked, floating down to his side and helping him to his feet. “You look like shit. Rose told me about your leg. Take it easy.” 

Dave didn’t know how to respond. This close, he could see his eyes, orange behind his shades. Bro’s eyes, but…different. These eyes were full of concern, not hardened and angry. He was a carbon copy of his guardian, younger, but identical. And yet, he wasn’t the same at all. This was the boy he’d hugged on the rooftop of a dead planet, who had worried about being a monster by design. Who had apologized for atrocities he hadn’t even dreamt of committing. This was his real brother. The one he’d always needed. Before he could think, he hugged him tightly, catching him off guard. Dirk was quick to recover, his arms wrapping around Dave and squeezing back with all his might. 

“I missed you,” he said hoarsely.

“I missed you too,” Dirk replied. “Every fucking day, bro.”

Dave laughed, squeezing his eyes shut to stop the tears from coming back. They parted, smiling at each other, and Dave clapped him on the shoulder. “How is everyone? You seem to have gotten your sea legs back.”

“They’re fine,” he said with a smirk. “Worried about you. It's good you came back when you did, they were contemplating sending a search party out after you. Where did you have to be so fast, anyhow? Hot date?”

He winced, and Dirk grimaced. “Sorry.”

“No, it’s okay,” Dave said with a strained laugh. “I just. It was overwhelming.”

“Yeah,” he smiled sympathetically. “I know what you mean. That’s why I came out here. It's, uh, a bit loud in there.”

They both looked back at the house in silence. Dave could see movement through the window, but no one else seemed to have noticed his return. He was grateful for it; a lump of nerves was clenching his trachea, and he wanted to fly away again. He held his ground.

“I reckon we oughta go in at some point,” he said with a sigh. “I don’t think frostbite’ll do me any good in a fight.”

“Yeah,” Dirk agreed with a nod. “I’m not exactly suited for the cold.”

They hesitated a moment longer, watching the snow fall. Dave put an arm around his brother's shoulders, not so much out of necessity as it was an excuse to keep him close. Dirk didn’t mind. He put an arm around Dave’s back and shouldered some of his brother’s weight as they walked up to the front door. As he turned the knob and stepped inside, the chatter in the living room stopped. Rose and Kanaya were nowhere to be seen, but the rest of the party was crowded into the space, talking amongst themselves. It suddenly felt too small, claustrophobic, and Dave grimaced as he felt all eyes in the room turn on him. He barely noticed, though, as he was drawn to two faces in particular; John and Karkat, sitting side by side on the sofa. John and Karkat, who both jumped to their feet when they saw him.

“Dave!” Jade exclaimed, rushing over. John was close behind her. “Where did you go? Are you alright? We talked about this! We need the buddy system!” 

Dave let go of Dirk, who decided it was time to make himself scarce. He wasn’t expecting the hug John crushed him into right after, nor the way he looked at him when he pulled away. He blinked, disbelieving of the softness on his face. It was such a contrast to when he had left. He had expected him to still be upset.

“Uh,” he said, licking his lips. His mouth felt dry. “Sorry. Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. I just needed some time.”

“Heh. Yeah, well, sounds about right, for a time god,” John grinned. 

Dave smiled back, but it flickered away as he looked over John’s shoulder. Karkat was standing there, looking awkward. He was shifting from foot to foot, trying not to look at them, but when Dave looked at him, those red eyes flicked up and met his. His heart tightened in his chest. 

“Listen,” he said, looking back to John. “I think I saw something. Out there. I think it was the door."

John's face turned grave, and he turned to look back at Jade, then Karkat, who looked like he might throw up. They exchanged a nod, and John patted Dave on the shoulder. 

"You should come sit down," he said. "We have a lot to catch up on."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading! if you enjoyed please leave a comment & kudos.


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